Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 13:29:43 -0400
From: Debra Henzey
Subject: News Release: Chatham Health Dept. Earns State Accreditation
Chatham Health Department Earns State Accreditation with a 100% Review
The Chatham County Public Health Department has shown that it can rise above significant challenges to earn its state accreditation with flying colors. It met 100% of the 41 benchmarks required by the state.
“I am so proud of our employees for demonstrating that they can keep programs running smoothly through changes in leadership and major facility renovations,” said Chatham County Health Director Holly Coleman.
The chairman of the local Board of Health, Bill Browder, added, “the accreditation verifies what we already knew to be true…we have an excellent Health Department. To achieve 100% accreditation is particularly rewarding since we were the only department under review this period that met all of the benchmarks.”
David Stone, who serves as the state’s accreditation administrator, and Joy Reed, who represented the State Health Director’s Office, officially recognized the department’s reaccreditation at a celebration on May 27th at Central Carolina Community College in Pittsboro.
The NC Local Health Department Accreditation Board, a joint program of the NC Division of Public Health and the NC Institute for Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill, oversees the mandatory accreditation for all public health departments. All local departments must go through the process every four years.
The intensive accreditation review ensures that local health programs have the capacity to effectively carry out basic functions and provide ten essential services. Three major steps are required:
* An agency self-assessment of 41 benchmarks involving 148 activities;
* A three-day site visit by a team of local health officials from other communities, including a health board member, health director, nurse and environmental health specialist; and
* An accreditation review by the Accreditation Board.
If a department misses just one activity, it wipes out the entire benchmark. “That is why completing the 148 activities required to meet all 41 benchmarks is a remarkable achievement,” Coleman said.
Preparing for the review process involved many hours of work, “including late nights and weekends by various employees,” Coleman said.
“We are especially grateful for the leadership provided by Vanessa Jeffries, who coordinated our accreditation process. She did an outstanding job.” Jeffries is division manager for Community Health
Promotion & Advocacy, Coleman commended other members of the department’s management team for
their leadership during the review: Dolly Huffman-Clayton, Shirley Cotton, Vicky Epps, Denise Estridge, Vicky Guetgemann, John Sauls and Andy Siegner. Carla Strickland, processing assistant, provided the
technical expertise to prepare all documents for review.
The County Board of Health also played a key role in the accreditation process, which required a major time commitment from a dedicated group of volunteers, said Coleman.
Browder reported that the Board of Health developed a strategic plan, evaluated the health director’s performance, and reviewed and approved various local health policies and procedures. “In some cases, we made changes to policies that will serve us better in the future.”
Coleman said that the department participated in the state’s first pilot of the accreditation process in 2004. “Vanessa and I are the only current managers in the department who were part of the pilot. Major revisions were made based on the pilot, so the criteria we were evaluated against and documentation required for this round were very different.”
Since the pilot year, the department has been led by five health directors, including two interim directors, and has survived major renovations of two facilities in the past two years. Coleman was named health director a year ago after serving as interim director for nearly eight months. She previously led the department’s Environmental Health Division.
“Changes in leadership can be a particularly difficult adjustment, but our staff just continued to do what had to be done to serve the public effectively,” Coleman said.
She said that the department also had experienced turnover in certain staff positions, which meant that “we had to make sure that the newer employees received the training they needed, understood other programs within the department, and followed relevant policies and procedures,” Coleman said. “And….this had to be done prior to the accreditation review.”
The Health Department’s on-going partnerships with various community groups gave them a boost in the accreditation process. “The evaluators look for demonstrations of local collaboration and we already had a sound track record in this area,” Coleman said.
While the review process was very time-consuming, she said that it “gave me a chance as a fairly new director to increase the depth of my knowledge about the inner workings of all services and programs. You don’t often see the details of how things work until something like this comes along.”
Another silver lining was that the process improved relationships. “You can’t work together side by side with a common goal for as long as we did and not have it impact relationships. Fortunately for us, it has made us an even stronger team,” Coleman said.
[ad#468×60]