Dr. Michael Fine | Public health liaison, Pawtucket
1. What are some of your first priorities after being named health liaison to Pawtucket in August? My first priority is to complete a community health plan for the city, pulling together all the public health and demographic data we can get and looking at that data through the lens of Pawtucket’s neighborhoods. This will allow us to understand what the true needs are in the community and how we can work collaboratively to directly address them. We began gathering information for the plan on July 10 and anticipate fully completing it by Nov. 1 or sooner.
2. What are the city’s most significant health challenges? We will know the most significant health challenges the residents face when the community health plan is complete. Our preview of the data suggests alcohol intoxication, substance use disorder, lead poisoning, cigarette smoking and the lung and heart disease it causes, adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are all significant issues. However, not all of Pawtucket’s neighborhoods are equally impacted by all of the challenges. We hope that the data will allow us to focus on specific neighborhoods to address their needs on a more granular level.
3. How does Pawtucket compare with the rest of the state in terms of public health? At this point, it is too early in the process to draw any comparisons. We will be able to compare Pawtucket’s public health with the rest of the state once the community health plan is completed in a couple of months.
4. Are you working toward any cost savings for the city and/or residents? To achieve cost savings, we’ll be looking at reducing unnecessary emergency department and hospital utilization, addressing adolescent pregnancy, and making sure every Pawtucket resident has a primary care home. Once that’s done, we’d like to see our success reflected in reduced health insurance premiums for businesses located in Pawtucket. We believe that our work on health care can turn into economic development as well for the people of Pawtucket.
5. Have you been able to use data to structure any new or upcoming programs? We hope to structure programs using the community health plan once it is complete. At this point in time, it is too early to determine what new programs or existing programs, if any, should be structured. We do not want to get ahead of ourselves on determinations prior to full retrieval of the data.
Elizabeth Graham is a PBN staff writer. Contact her at Graham@PBN.com.
