BY JANE HINSON

It’s time once again to celebrate National Public Health Week. April 1-7 has been designated the week that public health is celebrated nationwide.

Locally, we use this week to recognize the dedicated staff of the Iredell County Health Department. Our clinical, environmental health and administrative teams work diligently to promote and protect community, personal and environmental health.

How do we honor our mission?

Let me share a little data with you. During the last fiscal year:

♦ We had over 52,000 client contacts in our clinical service programs.
♦ We inspected over 1,600 Iredell County establishments in our Food Protection & Facilities program and conducted over 4,300 community visits in our On-Site Water Protection program.
♦ Our Health Promotion team participated in 50 community events, while 26,000 people interacted with the health education information presented on our Facebook account.
♦ We distributed over 40,000 COVID-19 at home test kits, 17,500 health education fliers and 76 car seats to our prenatal clients.

Our staff is continuously training to ensure that we provide legislatively mandated public health services in an efficient and thorough manner. In addition to environmental health services, other services provided include dental, prenatal, child health, health promotion, family planning, communicable disease control, care management for high-risk children and women with high-risk pregnancies, immunizations, vital records, the Women, Infant & Children’s program, and public health preparedness.

Our 111 full-time staff members will continue to serve our community with pride. Pride because we believe in our mission and core values of Excellence, Credibility, Integrity, Dependability and Communication. It has certainly been my honor and privilege to work over ten years with the Iredell County Health Department public health team.

Their dedication and compassion deserve to be recognized and applauded.

Jane Hinson is the Iredell County health director.