940: Audience Favorite PHRME: Local PH Departments + PHIG Funding

SUMMER JOHNSON: 

This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Tuesday, June 3, 2025. I'm Summer Johnson. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Today, we bring you a PHIG Impact Report. Twice a month on this newscast, we have a segment that showcases the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, otherwise known as PHIG, including how your colleagues across the nation are using it and how it's impacting the U.S. public health system. This morning, we sit down with Autumn Watson, public health organizational development director for the Mecklenburg County Public Health Department in North Carolina.

Thank you, Autumn, for joining us today. Would you mind starting off by telling us how you have used the Public Health Infrastructure Grant?

AUTUMN WATSON: 

So, we've used PHIG in a variety of ways over the last couple of years, concentrating on staff engagement, particularly coming off of the COVID-19 pandemic, when public health staff took an extraordinary hit, not just in workforce staffing and capacity, but also emotionally, trauma-informed all of these areas that we're recognizing coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what an impact it has made on our staff. Over the years, we've been able to implement a variety of program initiatives utilizing PHIG funding to really help boost that staff engagement, which also enhances our retention and our recruitment efforts as well.

JOHNSON: 

Are there any lessons that you've learned?

WATSON: 

One of our biggest lessons that we've learned is planning for sustainability with any sort of soft funding, which PHIG is considered soft funding, it's federal grant funding. There will be a time when that comes to an end, and the last thing that we want to do in public health is implement an initiative or a program without a sustainability plan, because at that point, we're just putting something out there while the money's there, and when the money dries up, we say, oh, never mind. We can't do that anymore. And it kind of takes us 15 steps back. So, planning for sustainability has been the biggest lesson that we have been able to take so far from PHIG and been able to put into practice.

JOHNSON: 

How has PHIG significantly impacted your department and community?

WATSON: 

Continuation of programs and services through COVID-19 is one large area that PHIG has been able to impact. We had never experienced a pandemic like COVID-19 before. When we did, we recognized some gaps in both our workforce areas and also within our community partners, and gaps that we could really- we were positioned in a way to help fill and start to build additional trust within our community. So through PHIG, we've been able to implement programs, new ones that we've identified post-COVID, but also continue some of the programs that we were funded for during COVID, especially after that funding started to dry up over time.

JOHNSON: 

What about results? Would you directly attribute any achievements to PHIG?

WATSON: 

One of our biggest things is really moving towards a culture shift for our workforce. We came into PHIG, again, coming off of the heels of COVID-19, we did a massive assessment with regard to our staffing, where we were, where we've been, what it looks like moving towards the future. And we had had a fairly significant turnover over the years. Throughout COVID-19, we had almost 40% of our staff that had only been here two years or less, which with the staff of about 1,000 that's a lot of people. So, we really went full steam ahead into a strengths-based culture. We adopted Clifton Strengths Assessments for all of our staff members through PHIG funding. We built it in sustainably with over the last couple of years, getting embedded strengths coaches certified so that we could continue our own strengths-based courses and curriculum and not have to be reliant on an outside contractor. And all of this has been in efforts of building on our, what we call, our universal standards of service; which are: respect, professionalism, accountability, communication, teamwork, and trust. And that's not just amongst our staff, amongst our peers of each other, that's also within our community.

JOHNSON: 

Finally, today, from your perspective, as part of a local health department, can you describe the coordination between your Department and the State of North Carolina to really maximize those dollars?

WATSON: 

North Carolina has really implemented a really good structure for working with our state health department. So, early on in PHIG, we have two funded entities, local health departments within North Carolina. We have Wake County, and then Mecklenburg County, which is where I am, and then our, obviously, our state health department, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. We recognized quickly that we needed to coordinate on a regular basis to make sure that we were working in complement of each other. So, we have established monthly meetings with our workforce directors of all three entities, and we also do quarterly, larger meetings with our principal investigators, our project officer that's tesponsible for all three entities within the State of North Carolina, and any additional applicable staff to go through, kind of, accomplishments, achievements, strategic planning, what's on the horizon, to ensure that we're constantly in complement of each other and not competing and/or working parallel or siloed together.

JOHNSON: 

Keep up the great work over there in Mecklenburg County. We're excited to see all of it come together.

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 Summer Johnson, you're listening to the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition, have a great day.