Local health department desperate for more staff

Officials with the Flathead City-County Health Department told the Flathead County commissioners on Thursday the department is staffed “far below” other similarly-sized counties, which is impeding on employees’ abilities to tackle contact tracing and other tasks associated with the valley’s burgeoning COVID-19 caseload.

Flathead County Deputy Public Health Officer Kerry Knuckles informed the commissioners during the health department’s bi-monthly update that “COVID continues to be a lot of work for the health department and it’s also quite a large cost for the health department.”

According to Knuckles, the department currently has 19 nurses and non-nurses working, in addition to a 7-person incident command team. She also said, “we are losing staff because they are so stressed and so overworked.”

In recent weeks, personnel shortages have prompted a backlog in data reports to the state health department. When asked about the number discrepancies between Flathead County and the state, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health and Human Services recently said “the [case] investigations are the highest priority, ahead of reporting the numbers to the state.”

Knuckles said in an email to the Daily Inter Lake on Thursday that it is unclear why hiring additional employees has been such a challenge. She said it could be due to a shortage of nurses in general, low wages for nurses or because other businesses are able to offer incentive payments for new staff and yearly bonuses, while the county cannot.

“If we can find more people to help with COVID, we desperately need them,” Knuckles emphasized.

She said via email the department would ideally like to hire another four nurses and at least three more contact tracers. That would bring the number of contact tracers to 10 and the number of nurses to 23 — totals that, although would be an improvement, still fall short of what other county health departments are working with amid the pandemic.

FOR EXAMPLE, the Lewis and Clark Public Health agency currently has 30 contact tracers, a nine-person technical assistance team, another nine-person quarantine and isolation team and a six-person support team.

Lewis and Clark County has an estimated population of about 70,000 individuals, or about 30,000 fewer residents than Flathead County, give or take. In addition, Montana’s COVID-19 Task Force shows Lewis and Clark currently had only 48 active cases as of Friday, compared to 300 active cases in Flathead County.

During the commissioners’ meeting, Knuckles also touched briefly on concerns related to funding.

The department is required to investigate all communicable diseases designated by the state — COVID-19 included — but Knuckles said “the money we have gotten through the state has never quite covered what we need to run that communicable program.”

Currently, the department is spending about $68,000 per month on staffing expenses that were not included in the department’s original budget. Those expenses are largely being supplemented by two separate state grants totaling more than $400,000.

But Knuckles told the commissioners those grant funds have now “been used up,” and although the department has some public health emergency money that can still be used in the coming months, more funding will be needed. Staff are currently working on gathering an estimate as to whether the department can use grant funds from the federal CARES Act.

The commissioners asked several questions related to CARES Act funding and how health department employees have been shifted around to assist with COVID-19 response efforts. The commissioners offered words of support to the department, though there was no discussion as to whether the county could allot additional funds at this time.

Reporter Kianna Gardner can be reached at 758-4407 or kgardner@dailyinterlake.com