photo by: Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health screenshot

The Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health board learned more about the status of the health department's search for a new director at its Monday, Dec. 19, 2022 meeting.

Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health’s search for a new director now has a tentative timeline, and conversations about passing family-planning services off to Heartland Community Health Center seem to have progressed to the brink of that transition taking place.

Members of the health department’s board heard updates on both items at their Monday meeting, a month after director Dan Partridge announced he’ll retire in June of 2023 and a week after Heartland CEO Julie Branstrom confirmed to the Journal-World that discussions about taking on family-planning — or Title X — services had been ongoing.

Partridge told the board that the pace of meetings with health department and Heartland leadership and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment about Title X has been “picking up;” the three parties met both last week and Monday.

He said Branstrom indicated Monday morning that she’d be taking a request to her board Tuesday night to sanction moving forward and applying with KDHE to become the county’s Title X grant recipient.

“The plan, assuming that the Heartland board does provide that approval, would be that they do a mid-cycle application as soon as they are ready,” Partridge said Monday night. “That’s likely going to be in two to three months. Then they would re-up at the normal time; the grant cycle’s typically July to June.”

In the meantime, Partridge said the health department is working on finding additional contractual staff to make sure that it can continue providing Title X services — which collectively includes preventive health services like access to birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted infections — until any transition, if and when it takes place.

Finding a new director

Board vice-chair Erika Dvorske is heading the committee formed to find Partridge’s replacement, and she told board members that the process will start with refining the job description. That information will then be used to create a request for proposals and identify some executive search firms to send it to.

Those elements, Dvorske said, will involve plenty of input from health department staff and board members. On that front, board member Erica Hill asked if the transition committee has discussed any questions about health equity, inclusion and diversity they plan to ask applicants, and what parameters there will be to show a commitment toward a diverse applicant pool.

Dvorske said she wasn’t in a position to answer those questions Monday night, but planned to take them back to the transition committee and would be glad to incorporate any expertise Hill is willing to provide.

The goal will be to vet any search firms and select one to move forward with at the board’s February meeting, Dvorske said. From there, she said the timeline should hopefully lead to a first round of interviews conducted by the board’s transition committee before the end of April, and then semifinalists will be invited to visit the office and meet with health department leadership in May. The second round of interviews would follow, this time conducted by the health board as a whole in executive session.

“I think I’ve said this before, but we are absolutely open to internal and external candidates, and excited about what the next chapter for Lawrence public health can be with a new leader,” Dvorske said. “We’re going to spend a whole lot of time celebrating Dan at some point, but we’re really focused on keeping this moving because we believe that having someone locked in as Dan gets ready to go is going to really just foster the kind of stability that we know everyone needs.”