Expanding Health Department Capacity to Provide Diabetes Management: NC American Diabetes Association Diabetes Education Recognition Program

Without medical care based on the most current standards of practice, diabetes can lead to serious, often fatal complications.  Many people in North Carolina do not have access to effective disease management care and education – particularly the poor and uninsured.  While health departments are well positioned to address this need, roughly half of North Carolina’s health departments lack the resources to provide these services.

In response, the NC Incubator Collaboratives and the Division of Public Health’s Diabetes Branch collaborated to provide health department staff with necessary training and American Diabetes Association (ADA) certified oversight, enabling local health departments to secure third party reimbursement for these services.

This approach not only allows for the program to be self-sustaining, but provides potential to generate enough reimbursement to local health departments to cover all fess for these services.

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Partnering with the NC Alliance of Public Health Agencies (NCAPHA) to provide Environmental Health Quality Improvement Trainings across North Carolina

In 2007, the NC Public Health Incubators partnered with NCAPHA and its Environmental Health Staffing Director, Malcolm Blalock, to provide Environmental Health Quality Improvement Trainings across the state.  Over the period of a week, three regional trainings were hosted for teams of health directors, environmental health directors and supervisors representing all of North Carolina’s 100 counties.  The primary purpose of these trainings were:

• To show participants real problems that can happen in the absence of a systematic Quality Improvement system
• To present ways of instituting elements of a systematic Quality Improvement system in local health departments
• To identify Quality Improvement measures that can be instituted in each county

View agenda (pdf)

Each participant received a toolkit of quality improvement activities for developing an ongoing quality improvement program for their county. The toolkit is also available below:

 

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Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (CATCH):
Targeting North Carolina Public Health Priorities with Accuracy and Precision

The South Central Partnership, the State Center for Health Statistics, and University of North Carolina at Charlotte partnered to create a Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (CATCH) tool for North Carolina public health. CATCH is an online warehouse that holds public health data and enables revealing reporting and analysis. This powerful and easy-to-use tool is designed to profile the health status of population, county, township, and census-track levels. CATCH benchmarks local data with other demographically similar communities, with state, and
with national averages. With this tool, authorized health
department staff can:

• Quickly and easily identify the public health priorities of their communities
• Measure impact of programs and services
• Precisely target populations for public health interventions resulting in better results using fewer resources
• Extract data for grant proposals
• Inform local and state policy and funding allocations
  

The health directors of the South Central Partnership recognized the value of this tool and provided initial funding necessary to improve community assessment data quality across North Carolina.

 

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