Delco moves ahead with study of health-care needs

MEDIA » Delaware County officials continue to move forward in doing an assessment of the county’s public health system and may get to work as early as next month.

Last week, Delaware County Council voted unanimously to conduct a study of the county’s health needs following conflicting information from credible evaluations.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked Delaware County as 12th out of 67 counties in Pennsylvania for health factors. On the other hand, it also ranked the county 49th for health outcomes.

Then the Aetna Foundation issued a report that listed Delaware County as one of the top 500 healthiest counties in the United States.

Determining the discrepancy among these was part of the motivation for council considering to doing this evaluation. Another has been that the last time such a study was done was a decade ago.

County Executive Director Marianne Grace is heading medical the effort to prepare a request for proposals to find a firm to complete the study. She said hopes to have such a request ready by the end of May.

She has created a committee to create the draft and its members include Dr. Jim Bonner, county Medical Examiner Dr. Frederic Hellman, county Senior Medical Advisor Dr. George Avetian, Lori Devlin, county director of Intercommunity Health and Chelsea Price, head of county’s Victim Services.

“I want us to be focused and not constrained,” Grace said. “I would be asking in our request ... to look at the delivery of public health. I want them to particularly look at underserved populations. I want them to have a strong consideration of the socio, economic and cultural diversity in the county and to look at the structure in which public health is delivered and make recommendations.”

County Council Vice Chairman Colleen Morrone explained that the actual study itself may take up to a year.

“I want an organization that is able to reach out to all of those various diverse cultures and populations and be able to get input, figure out ways to get input from them,” Grace said, adding that traditional ways of seeking input from certain populations may not be effective.

For example, Grace referenced the increase in low birth weights in the county.

““How do we reach those people?” she asked. “How do we reach the people that are having these issues that are contributing to the low birth weight? What is their opinion? How would they access health care better? How would they access it if we did something else? What do we need to do?

“We need to hear from those people,” Grace explained. “It’s a deeper dive that I would like to see.”

County council members are optimistic the study will be comprehensive.

“This is something every community tackles in one form or another,” Grace said. “As in all other things, we don’t have to invent the wheel ourselves. It is my hope and expectation that this study will take a look at what our counterparts do around the country and if there is a best practice, we can follow it. I’m looking forward to that and that’ll serve our citizens well to give them some peace of mind that ‘hey we’re doing everything we can’ and they’re going to get the services that best provide public health.”

Morrone said she also hopes it serves as a blueprint for the next 10 years, understanding dynamics change in that time. For example, she said heroin and opioids were not a large part of the former analysis as is expected in this one.

“It needs to be a framework that takes the county into the future, that prepares us for the next 10 years,” Morrone said.