Dan Partridge

This has been a year of adjustment at the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department.

A new director took over the reins of the department in January 2007 and began setting a new course. Dan Partridge replaced Kay Kent, who retired after 33 years at the helm of the department.

“I was the new kid on the block. Getting to know the staff is something you just can’t discount,” Partridge said recently as he looked back over his first year on the job. “I feel like I get a long with most of them.”

One of the first things Partridge did was call for a retreat – a series of casual meetings – with members of the health department’s board of directors and department heads.

“It was such a critical time,” health board chair Donna Bell said. “It was a good time to look at what we accomplished and then to look forward at what we want to accomplish.”

The result of that retreat was the establishment of broad objectives that focused the department’s relationship with the community, local policy-makers and its staff. The department also created a Web site.

Partridge, 48, was born and raised in Hutchinson and spent 15 years in the Reno County Health Department. He wanted to eventually become that department’s director. He was administrative services director at the time Douglas County called in 2006 and asked him if he might be interested in heading its health department.

“Here I am,” Partridge said. “I had my game plan. I’d been thinking about it for years and years.”

Partridge’s game plan for the county includes establishing a food service inspection unit. The department would contract with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to inspect local restaurants and follow up on complaints. That job will belong to the four-member sanitation unit who are now being trained. Partridge hopes they can start inspections July 1.

“We would do the field work,” Partridge said. “We would submit these inspections to the state and they would take it from there.”

Establishing food inspections is possible because of the downturn in the housing and construction market, which ties in with a lot of the work the sanitation unit does, Partridge said.

“Our workload needs to be shifted so we can maintain staff and keep busy,” he said.

Moreover, conducting food service inspections will bring in another revenue stream, Partridge said. About 80 percent of the revenue on the fees from restaurant licenses will go to the department for doing the inspections for the state, he said.

The health department has a $3.4 million budget in 2008. It has nearly 50 employees, most of them full-time. It gets 30 percent of its funds from the county and 20 percent from the city of Lawrence. Federal and state grants and service fees make up the other 50 percent. The grants have not kept up with inflation, Partridge said.

“The pressure has been on local tax dollars to make up for inflation,” he said. “Part of my focus has been on diversifying and increasing the fee structures.”

Partridge said he hopes the health department can move toward doing a community health assessment. One hasn’t been done in 10 years. The ideal would be to do one every three years, he said. Assessments would be based on surveys that ask about smoking and drinking habits, obesity, drug use, sexual behavior and availablity of physical and mental health services. That will help the community understand the “big picture” of local health, Partridge said.

Partridge’s efforts have made a good impression on the health board, Bell said. She called him a delight to work with.

“He’s made a lot of effort to understand Lawrence and Douglas County, the health department and the staff,” Bell said.

Partridge is a 2004 graduate of the Kansas Public Health Leadership Institute and a 2002 graduate of the Kansas University Public Management Center’s Public Health Certificate program. He earned undergraduate degrees from Kansas State University in fisheries biology, chemical science and milling science and management. He also is a certified sanitarian. In May 2007 he earned a master’s in public health at KU’s School of Medicine in Wichita.

Partridge and his wife, Rhonda, have two grown children, Matthew and Kurt. When he isn’t working, Partridge likes to work in his woodworking shop and in his garden.

“So much of what I do here (health department) is in the head, so it’s good to go out and do something with the hands to balance it,” he said.