The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

What does PHIG mean to you?

The Public Health Infrastructure Grant has really represented an amazing opportunity to invest in and strengthen our public health systems, so that we can therefore invest in stronger and healthier communities, and also prepare for the next public health emergency when it arises.

How have you used PHIG funding to foster collaboration?

In New York State, our public health system is broken down into a couple of different levels, if you will. So we have the state health department, then our regional offices, and then our local health departments. And the Public Health Infrastructure Grant has given us a really great opportunity to build more collaborative relationships and kind of cross-pollinate and cross-collaborate between those different levels. Despite these different levels of public health work throughout New York State, we really want to emphasize that we are one public health and we have unified goals, and therefore, we should be working in a unified way to achieve those goals.

Specifically, at the local health department level and the regional office level, we’ve been able to invest significantly in public health infrastructure for our local health departments and our regional offices. With our local health departments, we’ve been able to allocate over $40 million in Public Health Infrastructure Grant funding to those entities. And really, the breadth and depth of what is allowable for our local health departments using this funding is really significant and has resulted in a lot of really interesting and wonderful and heartwarming successes among our local health department partners.

What kind of programs have you helped launch?

Many of our local health departments have used this funding to hire additional staff, and those staff, with the addition of more full-time equivalents within our local health departments, have been able to work on so many different and wonderful programs. These range from community health and family health to epidemiology and opioid response. So all different kinds of public health programs and topics are being addressed by staff who are directly funded by the Public Health Infrastructure Grant. So just as one example, the Madison County Health Department in New York State, which is in our central New York region, has been able to use their PHIG funding to invest in creating an app that will be available to help link community members to needed health and public health-related resources that are available in their community. And that’s also creating an avenue for communication and information sharing and collecting, all of which the Madison County Health Department can use to plan for their public health programs, invest further in the programs and services that their community needs. Plus, in the event of a future public health emergency, the app will create another avenue with which to communicate with community members and get them access to the services that they need to be healthy.

Why is this work so important?

The cross-collaboration between these different levels of public health practice that we’ve been able to have, essentially because of the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, has resulted in a lot of increased cross-collaboration and cross-pollination between these different levels of public health practice. And we know that our local health department staff, they’re the ones doing the boots on the groundwork. They are the ones with the really important relationships with their community members, with their community-based organizations, their healthcare providers, and hospitals. They have those relationships. They’ve worked to strengthen those relationships over many, many years, and they have that boots-on-the-ground intel that regional offices and state public health practice might not necessarily have. And so we’re able to take this information from local health departments and use it at the regional and state level to create additional public health change and improvement. We may not otherwise have been able to have or make those improvements because we didn’t have that boots-on-the-ground information from our local health department partners.

Why is public health infrastructure important?

I would say that investing in public health infrastructure is absolutely crucial because public health is in everything, and everything is public health. What people might not realize is that public health is your clean water. It’s your sanitation. It’s your clean community pools. It’s making sure that the food you eat in restaurants is healthy and won’t make you sick. In addition to all these other maybe higher-level things that people might automatically recognize as public health, like vaccines or COVID response. So public health is in everything, everything is public health, and if we don’t invest in public health infrastructure, then we don’t get to see improvements in public health that benefit everyone in every community.

Healthier communities are better able to contribute to our economy. And so, in all these different ways, in all these different sectors of our society, public health is able to make improvements that can be felt and seen by everyone in every community and at every level. And that’s why investing in the Public Health Infrastructure Grant and other sources of funding for public health, and just public health generally, is absolutely crucial to everyone in our nation.