Daily News | Who makes public health decisions for your community? In Pennsylvania, it depends on when you live.
HARRISBURG — For more than two years, public health officials have answered Pennsylvanians’ most pressing questions about the coronavirus: Where are tests available? Are masks necessary? Who is eligible to get a vaccine?
To better understand those discussions, Spotlight PA talked to public health experts, researchers, and local and state health officials to probe how local health departments work, when they can be useful, and why some counties chose to walk away.If you live in Allegheny, Bucks, Chester, Erie, Montgomery, or Philadelphia Counties, you have a county-level health department. Allentown, Bethlehem, Wilkes-Barre, and York all operate city health departments.
“We don’t have a true national public health system where everyone follows the same policies, and everyone follows the same practices,” said Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health policy and management at George Washington University. “Just as all politics is local, all public health is ultimately local,” said Levi. “You have to be able to have a granular sense of what is going on in individual communities to be able to provide the right mix of services.”Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health policy and management at George Washington UniversityIt’s hard to tell from COVID-19 case data alone because many factors, like population size and density, affect those figures.
“It was critical,” Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said of working with the county’s health department director, Debra Bogen. “I cannot overemphasize how important having a health department was, and having a leader like Dr. Bogen, who could make local decisions instantly.”Having a local health department does not automatically lead to better health outcomes, said Levi, the George Washington University professor.