Secretary says agency is moving to fill leadership jobs
by Andy Marso, KHI News Service
The secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment says the agency is moving to fill several leadership positions vacated in recent weeks.
KDHE’s Division of Public Health is losing the directors of three of its eight bureaus and two supervisors who led sections directly under the bureau heads. Combined, the five had more than 80 years of experience. All of them worked with local health officials.
KDHE Secretary Susan Mosier, responding Wednesday to concerns some of those local officials expressed about the sudden loss of institutional knowledge, said the agency is working to quickly fill the void.
“We’ve got great people coming up,” she said.
Mosier said Jennifer VandeVelde, the chief of the agency’s sexually transmitted illnesses section, is set to replace Brenda Walker, who is retiring as director of the state’s Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention.
“She’s awesome,” Mosier said of VandeVelde. “She’s been involved in the agency for many years now and really knows the agency well.”
She said the agency is interviewing candidates to replace Paula Clayton, who is retiring as director of the Bureau of Health Promotion, and Mindee Reece, who was fired as director of the Bureau of Community Health Systems.
Both positions should be filled within a month, Mosier said.
“The outlook looks good,” she added.
Mosier said Clayton may continue to do some work for the agency on a contract basis. She did not touch on the departures of Jane Shirley, who worked directly under Reece as director of Local Public Health, or Tim Budge, who worked under Walker as section chief of immunizations.
Budge was terminated and has been replaced on an interim basis by Phil Griffin, the head of the agency’s tuberculosis control program. Shirley retired, then took a job with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas.
An agency spokeswoman has said KDHE will not comment on the reasons for the personnel changes.
Conference kicks off
Mosier was in Manhattan on Wednesday to kick off the 2015 Kansas Public Health Association conference.
Her 10-minute presentation to a Hilton Garden Inn ballroom full of state and local health officials focused on progress KDHE has made this year toward encouraging healthy living, including:
• Doubling the number of physicians participating in a “medical homes” program intended to better coordinate patient care.
• Increasing the number of day care centers enrolled in a healthy eating program.
• Increasing referrals to the state’s tobacco “quit line.”
• Increasing participation in workplace initiatives that stress healthy eating and exercise.
Mosier also touted the state’s KanCare program, which placed almost all Kansas Medicaid beneficiaries under the administration of three private insurance companies known as managed care organizations.
“While we have been able to improve health, we also have been able to bend the cost curve down over time,” Mosier said.
A healthy legacy?
Keynote speaker Paul Kuehnert told attendees that this year’s conference theme of “Promoting Health for All Kansans” means bucking a “pattern of stark disparities in our country” when it comes to health outcomes.
Kuehnert, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Bridging Health and Health Care Portfolio, said the disparities go well beyond access to health insurance and acute medical care.
“The vast majority of health is actually determined by other things, like what goes on in our social, economic or behavioral spheres,” he said.
The health effects of socioeconomic disparities are on display in places like Washington, D.C., he said, where a child born today in the wealthy suburbs of Maryland has a life expectancy seven years greater than a child born downtown.
But the disparities are also close to home for Kansans, Kuehnert said. He displayed a map that showed much better health outcomes in Johnson County than in neighboring Wyandotte County.
In part because of those disparities, Kuehnert said he and his public health peers may be the first in American history to serve a generation of children who live “shorter, sicker lives” than their parents.
“What is going to be our legacy?” he asked rhetorically.
Kuehnert said there’s still an opportunity to turn those life expectancy numbers around by establishing a “culture of health” that integrates social services with medical treatment.
But he acknowledged that a culture change would be difficult, given that 51,000 local public health jobs were cut nationwide during the recession.
“There’s no data to suggest those jobs are being replaced,” Kuehnert said. “At least not in significant numbers.”
During the question-and-answer session that followed his presentation, Kuehnert was asked how public health advocates should make their case to policymakers who question the government’s role in public health.
Kuehnert said that does create a “difficult set of circumstances” politically, but said he worked productively with policymakers who preferred limited government in his previous job in Kane County, Ill.
One of the keys is to form public-private partnerships, he said, and then ask the private sector partners to tout public health goals to lawmakers. But he stressed that public health officials shouldn’t shy from the discussion.
“We in public health have to engage in that conversation … but not in an adversarial way,” Kuehnert said.
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