New urgency for Delco health department
To the Editor,
To follow up on the January 2 Swarthmorean article, “Incoming Delco Council Engages Community as Resource,” there are new developments regarding a potential public health department in Delaware County. We applaud the efforts of the new county council to form a modern, locally based, nimble health department to respond to a variety of threats to public health.
The COVID-19 pandemic has given Delaware County a new sense of urgency. According to a March 19 press release, Chester and Delaware counties entered into an intergovernmental cooperation agreement to coordinate “medical advice and medical needs, investigation and contact tracing of positive cases, communication to healthcare providers and first responders, and, most importantly, communication to citizens.” This partnership was established specifically to address coronavirus. Delaware County has been functioning for several decades without a county public health department and was not organized to respond to this outbreak.
In recent years, public health needs of Delaware County have been handled by a patchwork of organizations, with Delco’s Department of Inter-Community Health providing resource and referral service. Ultimate authority in matters of health policy rests with the Pennsylvania Department of Health, which maintains a small satellite office in the City of Chester. The agencies addressing public health matters have been, and continue to be, vastly underfunded and under-resourced to meet the needs of a densely populated area of over half a million people. The lack of a public health department at the county level appears short-sighted in light of the current pandemic that has paralyzed much of the world.
Public health services are typically delivered with funding from federal, state, and local agencies, in concert with private partnerships. Pennsylvania’s local health administration law, Act 315, provides block grants to public health departments. Federal funding for unmet needs is available for maternal health, childhood nutrition, smoking cessation, and addiction treatment. However, these funds are available only to municipalities with sufficient administrative and human resource capacity.
Without a county public health department, state officials are managing this crisis from 100 miles away in Harrisburg. Local authorities are often not informed about details regarding infected individuals. Such lack of information potentially impedes both emergency responses and efforts to control the disease’s spread throughout the county.
As early as fall 2019, Delco’s commissioners began working closely with community stakeholders and the League of Women Voters, which has been advocating for a Delaware County Health Department for decades. With the efforts of the current council, we are hopeful that, within 18 to 24 months, the people of Delaware County will have their own professionally staffed health department to address any future crisis. We encourage you to support the county’s work to put a public health department in place to help this dream become reality.
Sincerely,
Olivia Thorne, President, Delaware County LWV Interleague Organization
Barbara Amstutz, President, LWV of Central Delaware County
Roberta Winters, President, LWV of Radnor Township
