914: Island Area PHIG Impacts

JANSON SILVERS: 

This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Tuesday, May 27, 2025. I'm Janson Silvers. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Today we come to you with another PHIG Impact Report. Twice a month, we will bring you this segment that showcases the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, otherwise known as PHIG, including how your colleagues from across the nation are using it and how it's impacting the U.S. public health system. This morning, we caught up with Moses Pretrick, the assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Social Affairs with the Federated States of Micronesia.

Mr. Pretrick, thanks so much for joining us this morning. I'd love to hear how you have used the Public Health Infrastructure Grant in your work.

MOSES PRETRICK: 

Yes. First, you know, I'd like to thank CDC again for extending this PHIG grant to the Federated States of Micronesia. It's one of our current big grants that we are utilizing to support, you know, public health services, but mostly for you know, workforce development as well as you know, data modernization for workforce. You know, we continue to use our funding to hire additional doctors and nurses, as well as IT staff to continue to support us at the hospital level. Also, as you know, shortage of doctors and nurses is one of our 'chronic health issues,' I would say, in the Federal States of Micronesia. It's not easy to, you know, increase that particular workforce, especially doctors. You know, we would get probably, like, one or two students a year that might come out of medical school, that would come back home. But at the same time, we also have doctors that are also retiring. But with the PHIG funding, the grant, we're able to hire, you know, additional doctors in the last few years to at least fill in some of these gaps, while we try to continue to fully support some of our students that are going into medical school. And so hopefully, you know, this group that we've hired under the PHIG grant will kind of help us to fill up the gap while we're waiting for additional doctors from our own country to come back, and hopefully can sustain that shortage of manpower that we continue to have. And so, I think we have probably close to 20 people that we've hired already on our PHIG grant that is supporting us throughout the four federated states in FSM.

SILVERS: 

And how are you and your team using PHIG to address those shortages?

PRETRICK: 

Yeah, so you know, one of our priorities for us going forward in the Federated States of Micronesia is, you know, we have so many islands in the FSM, and as you go outward from the main islands, you can actually see the health disparities is much greater as you go outward. And we have all these, what we call kind of health clinics or health centers. We have a lot of them, but they are pretty much manned by what we call health assistance. These are local workers. They do pretty much all the work out there. They're pretty much by themselves, or lucky if a health center is manned by two health assistants. And so we utilize our Health Disparity Grant that we received just prior to the PHIG grant. We use that to renovate two of our main dispensaries or health centers in the outer islands. And so, we're using part of the PHIG grant to hire doctors to place them at those health centers, you know, in the underlying islands, so hopefully, so that way they can provide better healthcare services to the surrounding population there. So, that's the idea and how we want to proceed going forward. That we know it's not going to be easy, because these doctors that we hire under the PHIG grant, they may have to leave us someday, unless we can sustain their stay with us, but otherwise, that's part of what we're doing with the PHIG grant, trying to extend quality health care services outwards from the main hospitals to the more rural areas.

SILVERS: 

Are there any specific milestones or achievements that you would attribute to PHIG?

PRETRICK: 

Yeah. I mean, I think aside from increasing the numbers, I think there are two main components of the PHIG grant. One is to support the workforce, and the other one  is to help advance our data modernization system. So, I think one of the key areas we've been working in modernizing our data system. We call it the electronic health record system. And so, we've kind of initiated with our own funding earlier, but then with the PHIG grant and little bit of ELC funding that came just before the PHIG grant. So, these two grants, you know, we use quite a lot of the funding to go into the further development of our electronic health record system, which is key to us, because it enables us to link our four states hospitals to our department at the national level. And so, we're going through various phases, I guess, the first phase, with the help of the PHIG grant, we're able to connect the departments within each of the hospitals in the Federated States of Micronesia, and also link all the hospitals together with us at the federal level. And the next phase is we will try and link in all our public health programs, because right now, it's only within the hospitals that are kind of connected and automated, but now we want to pull in the rest of our federal program so that their activities, data that they're generating can also feed into that same electronic health record system. Then our dream forward is to then start linking the other health centers within each state together, and hopefully also expand it to the private sector, if they're willing to be part of this network. So, I know it's a long project, but I think the PHIG grant is really helping us to advance this to where it is at this point.

SILVERS: 

We always appreciate you spending a few moments with us to break down the important work being done. Talk soon.

You can learn about the Public Health Infrastructure Grant and the work that's underway by visiting the PHIG website. We have a link in the show notes.

That'll do it for today. We're back tomorrow morning with more ASTHO news and information. I'm Janson Silvers. You're listening to the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition. Have a great day.