Board of Health

CITY OF SALEM BOARD OF HEALTH MEETING MINUTES October 10, 2017 MEMBERS PRESENT: Paul Kirby, Chair, Dr. Jeremy Schiller, Nancy Crowder, Kerry Murphy EXCUSED: Mary Lauby, Beth Gerard, Council Liaison OTHERS PRESENT: Larry Ramdin, Health Agent, Suzanne Darmody, Public Health Nurse, Maureen Davis, Clerk of the Board, Kimberly Waller, Salem State University TOPIC DISCUSSION/ACTION 1. Call to Order 7:03pm 2. Approval of Minutes N. Crowder motioned to approve the September 12th minutes. (September 12, 2017) J. Schiller 2nd. All in favor. Motion passed. 3. Chairperson Communications P. Kirby reminded everyone that there are two opportunities to attend a certificate program for MAHB, on 11/4 in Marlborough and 11/18 in Taunton. N. Crowder plans to attend on 11/4. K. Murphy could possibly attend on that date also. They could bring back opioid materials. 4. Monthly Reports-Updates a. Public Health L. Ramdin introduced intern Marliy Diallo, RN, a senior RN to BSN Nurse’s Report student at Salem State University doing her Public Health internship with us until December. She is a great addition to us, always willing to help. S. Darmody attended lots of flu clinics since she helps with other towns’ clinics. Still doing DOTs for TB cases. Got the last amount of seed funding for the Working on Wellness grant. J. Schiller asked how many blood pressures she does at the Farmers’ Market. S. Darmody said usually about a dozen per day, but it varies. Had three or four consistent people. Good for screening purposes. P. Kirby noted he really liked the signs near the elevator encouraging people to take the stairs. Salem State asked if they could get permission to use our signs. Others also asked. S. Darmody said there are templates for the signs available on the CDC website. P. Kirby inquired how soon we will get news on how nasty the flu virus will be. S. Darmody said usually in December. Salem hasn’t seen any cases, but some surrounding towns have. Copy available at the BOH office b. Health Agent’s P. Kirby wanted to follow up on food truck festival. Report L. Ramdin stated if the food trucks are ready, each truck should take 5-10 minutes for an inspection. Some trucks had sanitizer issues and temperature issues which takes up more of the inspector’s time. Unfortunately, their lack of preparation is seen as inaction on the part of the Health Department. There were challenges with some of the trucks not being ready. He said the inspectors did their jobs and some people are just impatient. P. Kirby received a call from Councilor Famico on Saturday at 11:20am informing him that “a large number” of food trucks had not been approved and the festival was supposed to start at 11:00am. He went to the Common and found that only two trucks were still awaiting inspection. He asked several other food trucks how it went with inspections and they all said it was fine. He suggested maybe we have more staff to do the inspections next year. L. Ramdin said last year there were 25 food trucks at the festival. This year there were 41 trucks. Lots of work was done ahead of time by the inspectors, such as contacting each truck with expectations. Also, Household Hazardous Waste Day was the same day at the same time, so some staff were working there and were unavailable to do inspections. P. Kirby thought it turned out fine and admits there was some amount of overreaction. Wants to take it as a learning experience and ensure we have adequate staff in the future. If we are able to separate Household Hazardous Waste and the Food Truck Festival that would be helpful. L. Ramdin will try to move Household Hazardous Waste one week up if he can get that date so staff will be available. He said internal discussions are ongoing. J. Schiller asked L. Ramdin if he has ever administered a survey to the food trucks to see what their experience was like. He responded that he has not. K. Murphy asked how much lead time we would need to know how many trucks there will be so you can staff accurately. L. Ramdin said two weeks’ notice would be enough. The event organizer, Chris, approves the trucks that are coming to the event. They collect their applications and then send them to us. We got them a week before. We will do whatever we can to ensure it happens. Unfortunately, people believe what they are seeing on social media to be the truth as against what reality is – we have no control over that. N. Crowder said imagine if someone actually got food poisoning – the opposite of waiting an extra 20 minutes to start the festival. She asked if we can have the Food Truck Festival on the agenda for next year to discuss how many staff we should have. Larry said he will make the decision about how many inspectors he will have, but of course he will take the Board’s advice on anything. J. Schiller said he doesn’t think we can just dismiss social media. There has been innuendo and a lot of negative comments about the Board and the Department and Larry personally and it’s very upsetting. But we can react to the social media comments by showing that the Board and the Health Dept. put on safe events. P. Kirby suggested that the Board check in next year around the time of the festival to see if Larry needs anything. Perhaps we put together an annual calendar for major events, i.e. Food Truck Festival, Farmers’ Market, HHW, etc., so that as a Board we can be proactive. L. Ramdin agreed because then we can say, for instance, the Board will not entertain applications for these events received after a certain date, etc. There is a lot of work involved with these major events. L. Ramdin announced mosquito season has ended. He distributed the mosquito surveillance program report to members. Thankfully we had no positive cases of anything. Decisions to spray are based on if we have positive pools. If they are non-human biters we don’t spray, but if we have positive pools of human biters, we spray. Ticks are out in abundance and people should take precautions to protect themselves. The syringe program has not started yet. Mary Wheeler is waiting for DPH to give her the go ahead. Suzanne will coordinate with Mary Wheeler to vaccinate at-risk people with our state supply of flu vaccine. P. Kirby asked how the Bloomberg Challenge was. L. Ramdin said it was great. One of the ideas they came up with was an alternative to ER visits, such as an acute care center where they can be assessed and given direction and information about services because the ER is not really geared to deal with this. He said there is a wealth of services that people and their families are not aware are available in the City. Two wonderful programs are Learn to Cope and Grasp programs that meet at the hospital. Another idea was to start up at the middle school age because that is where people start to get interested and exposed to addictive substances. We have a really good life skills program that started this term at the middle school. We also provided some information to the Boys and Girls Club. The workshop was part of the application process that the Mayor’s office is handling. The selected winner gets $10 million, but other applicants can get $1 million. There was good enthusiasm from the group. The Mayor, police department, school department, Mary Wheeler, the hospital and treatment professionals were all there. L. Ramdin reminded the Board he will be out of town visiting Northwestern University as a site visitor for their accreditation October 29-31. Also, the first week in November he will be in southern California for the Integrated Foodborne Illness and Response Management Conference and he is presenting utilizing the food code as a tool in foodborne illness prevention. He will be co-presenting with a person from the FDA and moderating two sections. P. Kirby asked who the audience is for the risk factors of FBI. L. Ramdin said it is the restaurants. Departments can set up trainings and build a partnership with the restaurants. Copy available at the BOH office  c. Administrative J. Schiller pointed out the amount of money being generated to the Report City by the temporary food permits is dramatically up even though we’ve lowered the rate because there are so many more permits being issued. He wants to be able to show the increase in productivity and time invested with the lowered fees. L. Ramdin will put the discussion of the budget on the January agenda. If the Board makes some decisions and looks at the numbers and shows the Mayor our inspectors are working a lot more because of the increase in permits, it will help with some of the requests he’s been making like needing another inspector and a public health program specialist in the office to assist in planning and executing new public health programs that addresses reducing major health risks. J. Schiller said the Board has a role in advocating with the submission of the budget. Copy available at the BOH office d. City Council Beth Gerard not present. Liaison Updates J. Schiller motioned to approve the three reports. N. Crowder 2nd. All in favor. Motion passed. 5. Board of Health Program 10-minute recess to set up projector for Kimberly Waller, PhD, Planning & city health status MPH, Health Advisor in Health Care Studies at Salem State discussion University. Back in session. a. Presentation by Kimberly Kimberly Waller introduced herself and gave some background on Waller, Salem State her many professional experiences, including community health University, on how Boards education and global public health. She approached the Mayor to see of Health across MA if she could help in some way and was asked to advise us on how to approach health/social approach and enhance city functioning to address health/social issues. issues She showed a slideshow which included data on gateway cities (cities across the state that are struggling regional economic centers). She shared that she and her interns found it hard to pull data. She asked if we have a place where people could see data on top health and social issues. We do not. She wonders what community members feel are the top issues. She would like to help us identify top health and social issues in Salem and develop potential strategic directions. J. Schiller asked how she would envision it working. K. Waller said speaking one-on-one with someone would work best. K. Murphy offered to talk with her since she works for Mass in Motion and suggested they could work together. K. Waller agreed. P. Kirby will circulate K. Waller’s presentation via email to the Board to review. L. Ramdin pointed out that the major health issues are not always the  ones that get the most attention. We must do a full community health profile to get out of a reactive mode. K. Waller said we need a platform to work from. P. Kirby asked K. Murphy if she was able to attend the homeless forum. She said she did, and the main problem seems to be the transient homeless making camps on Salem Common, etc. N. Crowder feels the problem is lack of affordable housing. K. Waller would like to propose the next step. She will go through the data of Salem and share the results. The Board can pinpoint their concerns. Would like to talk about how we can make the data more available. Everyone is excited about the proposal. P. Kirby asked K. Waller if she can come back next month. She accepted the invitation. We will put it on our agenda for the November meeting. b. Discuss health assessment L. Ramdin said the report is not as in-depth as a community health by Sarah Corley, Health report that has feedback from the community and focus groups and Department summer asking questions about peoples’ perceptions v. realty. He said we intern need to improve the marketing of the programs that are available to people. We could have some open forums where people can discuss the issues. We have moved from communicable diseases causing mortality to chronic diseases, i.e. obesity. Communities can make changes such as making better areas for walking, etc. Asked what can we do better. 6. New Business / Scheduling of future N. Crowder asked if the Board is going to get involved with agenda items marijuana. L. Ramdin said broadly, yes. P. Kirby asked what, if any, role did the Board have in the medical dispensary. L. Ramdin said the only role they had was to issue either a letter of non-objection or objection. We received a letter of non-objection. There is no longer a role for the Board of Health because DPH changed the rules mid-stream. 7. MEETING ADJOURNED: N. Crowder motioned to adjourn the meeting. K. Murphy 2nd. All in favor. Motion passed. 8:48pm Respectfully submitted, Maureen Davis Clerk of the Board Next regularly scheduled meeting is Tuesday, November 14, 2017 at 7:00pm At City Hall Annex, 120 Washington Street, Room 313, Salem, MA