Outcomes Story, South Carolina

I got a nice email from an alum a couple of weeks ago, Marie Horton from the South Carolina Dept of Health and Environmental Control, DHEC.

We were in the 2001-2002 group. Our project concerned training food establishment staff with the help of a video we produced on food safety. The video was based on our SCDHEC health inspector inspection sheet... The project was a success. I ended up pushing the video through to completion and we had it translated into Spanish and Mandarin a few years ago. The Environmental Health Division has it up on our SCDHEC website, if you want to take a look.

Here's a link to the "food protection" links page at DHEC. Note that DHEC staff partnered with the restaurant association to create and fund this video. This is all by way of background for what comes next:

The Environmental Health Division is working on a new product. They received grant money to produce a food defense video to prevent intentional food contamination. The planning meeting is next week and they have asked me to come and represent our Management Academy team. They want input on our experience in preparing our video.

Just wanted to share that with you. The work lives on!!!!!!!!!

I love the fact that this team implemented their plan. And I love the fact that their experience-- the specifics of what they did and the general lessons about business planning-- continue to bear fruit. Onward and upward!

-- Steve Orton

More on Flu's Clues

I'd be interested in hearing more about the project Steve wrote about Monday. It’s called “Flu’s Clues,” and it provides flu vaccine clinics in local public schools. As of mid-October, Tazewell County, VA, nurses had given 596 flu vaccines in 9 school clinics, with two clinics left to go. That’s quite an achievement! This happened in the Cumberland Plateau Health District of Virginia. We write about the CPHD at length in Chapter 7 of the book (Competitors and Partners) as an example of great partnering activity over several years that has resulted in some amazing projects (pp. 67-69).

Some thoughts and questions about this program:

First, this program is a good example of strategic budgeting. You could never just take the annual costs of this project and divide them by 12 to get monthly costs. How does a program like this deal with the large fluctuations in costs over the course of a year? Have any of you come up against this problem in their program planning?

Also, does this team have a plan to expand the program at some point to offer other products or services to school children? Well-child tests or other immunizations, for example? Or is this an example of something well-focused that should stay that way?

Public schools can be problematic when it comes to private sponsorship. Did you come up against that here? What about the rest of you who have experience working with schools – several teams have attempted such programs over the years. One obvious lesson might be to make sure you include a representative from the local schools on your planning team. What are other lessons learned to share from the process of working with public schools?

Anne Menkens

Outcomes Story

Talked on the phone a couple of weeks ago with Kathy Hypes, a public health manager in southwest Virginia. She and a team of colleagues created a business plan back in 2004 to fund flu shots for kids in the school system of Tazewell County, a rural county in the mountains of Virginia.

Talk about unforeseen barriers: for two years the whole country had problems getting the right flu vaccine. Finally last year the group launched their pilot flu shot program in Russell and Tazewell county elementary schools. From that pilot year the team gathered positive stories and used their pilot success to expand the program to the middle schools this year.

If you have worked with the schools before you realize the challenges associated with permissions, space, and timing for a project like this-- not to mention the challenge of making sure that you can generate enough revenue to support the work. Through a combination of Medicaid billing, insurance, state money for uninsured children and a contract with Anthem Healthcare, they have made the finances work-- and made a well-targeted intervention to prevent flu and the spread of flu with one of the larger institutions in the area.