Chautauqua County Legislature’s Human Services Committee
The County Legislature’s Human Services Committee approved a $2 million grant to hire fellows to work with the County Health Department.
Department of Health and Human Services Director Christine Schuyler said the two-year grant is through the State Department of Health Public Health Corps Fellowship Program, “This was a brainchild of the State Health Department during the Pandemic. In an effort to increase the public health workforce, this program was devised and every county in the state was allocated a certain amount of funding in order to either employ, or contract with, or some how bring these fellows on board.”
Schuyler said the county would use a local non-profit agency to hire the fellows. She said the grant funding received allows hiring up to 13 fellows, but the county will likely only use four.
Schuyler said the fellows are those working toward degrees or have degrees to eventually become employed in public health. She said the state guidelines allow the fellows to work in a variety of ways, “So for instance, we could have a fellow placed at the federally qualified health center to assist them with COVID work. We are also in the process of our community health assessment, which is a requirement of the state and a fellow could assist us with that process from the outside, and also with our accreditation of our local health department which is something we’ve been wanting to do and we now could have extra resources through this state funded program to help make that happen.”
Schuyler said this program would hopefully bring in more people to work in public health. She said the Health Department has experienced a 20% cut in workforce in the last 10 years and given that it’s an aging workforce, employees also will be retiring soon.
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