This transcript is auto-generated and may contain inaccuracies.

SZEPUI HUGHES:

Thanks so much for joining us today. We’ve got a really great session for you as part of our final concurrent session round at our virtual day. In this session, we’re going to hear how two jurisdictions have leveraged partnerships and Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) resources to build more sustainable public health infrastructure.

First, our colleagues in Hawaii will highlight the relationship between public health and the university and how their academic collaboration supports long-term sustainability and staff development. Then we’ll learn how Kansas has utilized PHIG funding to recruit and retain key staff, critical to sustaining core public health initiatives.

So while this session is webinar style, we would love to hear from you throughout the session. Feel free to share your thoughts and reactions in the chat as we go. And without further ado, I will turn it over to Brad Suenishi and Scott Murakami from the State of Hawaii Department of Health.

SCOTT MURAKAMI:

Good afternoon, everyone.

SZEPUI HUGHES:

Take it away.

SCOTT MURAKAMI:

Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Scott Murakami, the PHIG Workforce Director and Principal Investigator for the grant for the State of Hawaii, and with me today is Brad Suenishi, our Retention Manager.

So we’re going to just talk to you really quickly about how we’re planning and building sustainability into our programs and our initiatives. And to start with, I guess the best way to put it is we try to sustain initiatives that are showing promising practices that we really believe can contribute to the overall well-being of the department, and primarily in changing the organizational culture and addressing root cause issues in our recruitment.

So the first place to start with I think is at the highest level we try to stay focused on (CFDA) 93.967, the collaboration between academia and our department to further advance infrastructure. So we realized part of the reason for doing this is because not we’re not the only organization out there that qualifies for funding under this CFDA number.

So we work closely with our partners in education and in other areas within public health to help them understand that the three pillars that drive PHIG are really data evidence-driven planning and implementation partnerships that play a critical role, and then resources are directed to support equitable access to help.

So we help them understand that, and that way we’re ensured that any opportunity comes up. We may not be the best applicant for it, but they realize that they confirmed to us for support and partnership.

So before we start any type of program or initiative, we start out with these planning metrics. It’s a little small, but we wanted to be sure that you’re able to at least get a flavor for the things that we included in the matrix.

So, for those of you who attended the Saint Louis session, this metric is a little different. We have updated it because we started the fourth line down in the 4th light green line is new.

What we did since coming back from Saint Louis is we started up a coffee hour session,  or I should say a lunch and learn and lunchtime session that focuses on the development of technical sales within the department, but also looks at purpose, values, and the mission of the department, and brings in speakers to talk about those things.

And so we built sustainability into it by understanding what the key elements are that we need to make sure we’re achieving both short-term and long-term goals. What are any types of barriers that we may enter or encounter? What is the tactical play for this, or what are the things that we need to do now to make sure that we can meet both the long and the short-term goals, and what are the key partnerships?

So that’s kind of where we start. And then what I’m going to do is turn it over to Brad to talk about some specific initiatives, and we’ll get back to you on some other things at the end. So thanks, Brad.

BRAD SUENISHI:

This is our overview of our workforce development process, or our design and implementation of our workforce development process. So, workforce planning is understanding our current labor market and our forecasted labor market here in Hawaii.

And then our main focus right now is focusing on our current workforce with employee retention. So, focusing on them as people and, like Scott was saying, kind of shifting the organizational culture to drive those positive outcomes for the greater future in public health.

And then we’re also looking at new employee recruitment. What we really want to try to reduce is the churn and the revolving door of employees. And that’s why our current priority right now is on employee retention within these three parts of this process?

 5:33 Okay, so we have a few memorandum of agreements with the University of Hawaii and its Community College system with this collaboration with the University of Hawaii Department of Public Health Sciences.

We work to provide professional development opportunities for our current workforce at the Hawaii State Department of Health and that can include things like public health 101 for people who don’t have a public health background in our department, so they can understand what the importance of public health is and why that’s why it’s important, why the role is important in the department.

In addition, they offer workshops such as Canva for graphic design so they can work on public health flyers, about how their messaging goes out, and whatnot, in addition to this Hawaii public health collaboration.

We’re working with the Department of Education on building public health career pathways to feed into the public health field and within our department. Lastly, stipends are paid to practicum students within our department.

With more professional development and personal enrichment, we’re working with the University of Hawaii community colleges. Specifically, this one is with Leeward Community College (LCC), and that’s to offer these non-credit courses available to Department of Health employees.

These things can focus on what they refer to as 21st-century skills. That could include workshops involving communication, problem-solving, things like that, and also team-building experience workshops.

So what we’re working on is really building this, I guess you could call it a portfolio of these resources, professional development workshops, personal enrichment, things to help improve the employee experience for our workforce at the department.

This right here, this image we put in the registration website through the University of Hawaii Community Colleges system, so specific for our department. So they can come here and register for these workshops and whatnot directly through the university, and it is specific for our department.

Then this Act 291 was signed into law earlier this year. And the main part of this is that with our collaboration with the Community College system in that previous slide, I had, or we had, within the workshops, there’s an office and administrative program that can be used as a substitute, as a required or desired experience.

So it provides the department with flexibility to hire people into the department. That’s what that Act 291, the big benefit with that. And again, that’s with the MOA, with the with Leeward Community College. Yeah, I’ll turn it over to Scott for this.

SCOTT MURAKAMI:

Thank you, Brad. So there are some initiatives that we know from the start are not going to be sustainable, but they make a lot of sense for us to enter into now.

So one of those is the co-location of our big workforce team and administrative team at the camp on the campus of Honolulu Community College. So we actually operate out of Honolulu Community College, and it allows us a number of benefits that I’ve listed here.

We can, some of the things for example that are listed here are the opportunity to kind of explore some research together. So one of the things that we’re working on is that Brad talked about an office assistant program that creates an opportunity or pathway for non-credit students to enter into our state workforce.

And because Act 291 allows for that to happen, we’re able to create a program that uses micro credentials with Leeward Community College. So our efforts would be to go out with Leeward, recruit employees in that process, get them to come through using the micro credentials they accomplished, which is allowable under the statute of our pilot project.

And then subsequently, if the individual works out, we can hire them into our programs, and if they don’t, we can return them to the program to get additional training on it. So there’s a symbiotic relationship that exists there.

It certainly helps us to do a lot of administrative things together. For example, the new program that I talked about on purpose and values, we are able to invite the administration from the community colleges to join us and participate in it because they encounter issues with alignment of purpose, values, and mission. So we can jointly share resources that way.

And then it just strengthens the relationship between the two employers. I think one of the things that I wanted to share with you is what’s going to happen in 2027 at the end of the grant. And the reason I wanted to go to this slide is because we’ve broken up sustainability on academic programs for recruitment in two ways.

One is through traditional students that go through a credit program and through the non-credit program. And, what’s important to realize is that as we do these research initiatives with, for example, Leeward Community College, there is funding that’s tied to it that can sustain it. That is not part of our program.

So we paid for its development. They had used prior funding to develop the microcredentialing capability, but we pay for the curriculum development and for the new microcredential to be offered jointly with the Department of Health. So for the credit programs, we look at anything that’s pathway-related to the DOE and the community colleges.

We look to the Perkins CTE money that’s now administered, I believe, by the Department of Labor. I think they moved it from DOE to labor. Of course, for all programs that are accredited, we look at Title 4 as being a source of funding.

So everybody who fills out the FASTFA can, you know, get scholarship money or tuition support and loan support to participate in our programs because they’re all accredited programs.

And then we look to integrate wrap-around services with our TRIO program, and that program helps people, from veterans to individuals with disabilities to individuals who are first-generation college students, to ensure success in whatever their academic endeavor is.

For the non-traditional programs like our office assistant program, as well as some of our employee like incumbent employment training programs, we can fund it through what’s called the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act (WIOA). So what we used to do was the adult dislocated worker program to fund those initiatives.

The things that we’re still working on funding are how do we do employee engagement activities and professional development activities. We still haven’t gotten around that one. And then another thing that we’d like to find a way to fund is an ongoing stipend, a stipend for practical students.

So one of the things that we are tossing around is it viable to fund them with some state general funded salary savings? That’s a little tricky because it crosses budget categories, but nonetheless, if you think about it right, you’re funding the future workforce, you are getting some employee time through the practicum student.

So we’re looking at that as a possible way of funding. And that’s, that brings us to the end of our presentation.

We try to keep it as short as possible, and we’re happy to take any questions at the end. We’ll turn it back to you folks. Thank you.

SZEPUI HUGHES:

Thank you so much, Scott and Brad, and we will have time at the end for questions. But if folks would like to drop any questions that they have now in the Q&A or in the chat, please go ahead and do so. And we’ll be sure to get to it at the end.

But really appreciate that example of Brad and Scott of collaboration with the university. And I’m sure that folks have a lot of questions around some of the how, and we can get to that.

But what I’d like to do now is pivot to introducing our next speaker, Ashley Webb at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, who will talk to us more about how they’ve used their PHIG funding to recruit and retain key staff. So, Ashley, please take it away.

ASHLEY WEBB:

Awesome. So yes, my name is Ashley. I am with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment as their Workforce Development coordinator and internship coordinator. Normally, Melody Hazard would be joining us, but she wasn’t able to today.

So it’s just me, but I can still do it. So our presentation is We Bee recruiting. It’s about a symbiotic relationship between KDHE and PHIG.

And so next slide, so about our agency, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, we call KDHE, is comprised of three divisions, which are our public health division, environment division, and healthcare finance division.

And our Healthcare Finance division includes our state’s Medicaid program, Kancare.

We are the only agency in the nation to have these three entities under one roof, which allows us to take a more holistic approach to improving and protecting the health and well-being of all Kansans.

Our executive leadership team within KDHE is responsible for providing strategic and operational leadership and is an interdependent, collaborative decision-making body, strategically executing our agency’s mission and vision.

All right, so this chart is provided by the CDC. When talking about what this presentation is going to touch on, it’s more about workforce development and foundational capabilities, but more so workforce development.

And then our year one in review, obviously hiring key staff, beginning our data modernization assessment, retaining those key staff, initial distribution of local health department funds, and then our internship and scholarship pipeline.

So I’ll go to the next one. So again, when I talk about the mutualistic relationship.

So we have committed to improving our workforce development through multiple recruiting and retention changes, thanks to the public health infrastructure grant. The mutualistic relationship between PHIG and KDHE is comparable to the symbiosis of bees and flowers. So that’s why you know why our presentation is bee themed.

For those of you who may not remember high school biology, symbiosis is a close, long-standing relationship between two different organisms that are different species in this comparison. This would be an example of mutualism where both species benefit from the relationship.

So PHIG in this comparison represents the flower from which KDHE, which is our hive and its employees, the bees have been collecting pollen from. Melody and I are among the 1600 worker bees at KDHE helping provide for the whole agency through the work we do in the Office of Personnel Services.

With the pollen or the funds that PHIG provides, KDHE’s recruitment and retention rates have been able to grow and improve in new ways. This, in turn, through the dispersal of figs pollen by KDHE’s bees, fulfills the mission of PHIG by helping promote and strengthen the public health system here in Kansas.

So when the flower blossoms, the bees will come. This is kind of a recruitment strategy. So job postings, we offer more career ladder series to increase the number of applicants and advertise growth opportunities, reviewing salaries based on where applicants fall along those steps of the series.

Promotional opportunities, providing hiring managers with guidance on promoting and retaining staff following those established ladders, if applicable, for employee advancement. Outreach, we have requested staff to attend career fairs so they can properly showcase the health and public health careers we have at KDHE.

And then creating and strengthening networks with universities, high schools, and other organizations. And then, in turn, through those networks and connections, we can offer internships. We provide, offer, and provide paid and unpaid. Then we also encourage our supervisors to retain their interns through open positions at KDHE.

Obviously, improvements in completing salary reviews of job classifications with salary increases of up to 10% for certain positions. And then we provide monthly turnover rates to our Bureau directors to help strengthen our workforce system and policies.

And then retaining the staff, discussing the importance of filling those vacant positions and retaining the fully trained staff, and doing that by providing opportunities for growth, promotions, training, and benefits such as educational assistance.

So some examples of recruitment improvements that we have is through the efforts of the throughout the internship efforts, recruitment for vacant positions has become more successful by creating a list of employee volunteers throughout the agency that would be willing to attend career fairs on behalf of HR because most students do not want to talk to HR.

So, we also created a flyer to showcase entry-level positions, positions that do not require a degree or require much experience. And then also creating a worksheet, a CHEAT SHEET for our volunteers with information about other bureaus that they’re not familiar with, to answer questions that they may receive at career fairs.

KDHE has also strengthened recruiting efforts by doing the following:

We’ve building on a list of networks with universities and high schools by establishing new connections and fortifying already existing ones.

A great example is, I am a Washburn University graduate, and that is our local university pretty close to our main office here in Topeka. And so because I am a Washburn alumni, they have latched on to me and we’ve created a even stronger bond with their career engagement office.

So, we also find programs throughout the agency for all majors and create partnerships through them. So with these improvements brought on by PHIG, KDHE has been able to expand its reach in finding valuable candidates to better serve Kansans.

So let’s talk about successful internships funded by PHIG. So we did have some PHIG-funded internships, thanks to the A2 PHIG KDHE, which offered 14 internships from 2024 to 2025, six in public health, foreign environment, and three in admin, and then one in healthcare finance.

So in 2024, we were able to offer 480 hours at $15.03 an hour. We were able to have 9 internships that year, and then 2025 kind of had to shorten the year. I mean the hours, but still 385 hours at $15.03 an hour, and we had 5 interns.

So one of the PHIG-funded interns recently transitioned into a full-time KDHE employee at the end of their internship. Are we able to play the video for the internship?

SZEPUI HUGHES

Oh okay, Victoria, are we able to turn the volume up?

FAITH (Video):

Thank you for saying, like, cleaning the lab basically. And then I learned how to pipette. I got to watch so many different actual assays being performed and different conditions we test for, and I toured different departments.

LAUREN LARGE (Video):
For the health section, we have 4 different units and when we have an intern, we make sure that they get to spend time in each of the units they get to observe and we get them hands on, on the processes that they’re allowed to participate in. And then if they show an inclination towards one of the units that they really want to spend more time in, we’ll start prioritizing that once they’ve seen all of them.

FAITH (Video):

I learned a lot about how to work with people. I previously only worked at a coffee shop, so a professional setting is very different from a coffee shop. So I learned a lot about how to properly communicate with people, when to step in and offer assistance for things, when to just listen and learn.

LAUREN LARGE (Video):

Faith as an intern, first, she was a wonderful intern just because she came with such a positive attitude, wanted to work and was so flexible. So when we did throw her in different units, she was always ready for something new and she could adapt quickly, which is always a benefit in a lab environment.

We were short-staffed in our newborn area at the time, and so she started helping there. That was the greatest need for us, and she had a real inclination for work there. That’s where we let her just keep developing skills. And so through that, she decided that that’s a job she wanted to continue. And once she graduated and obtained that degree, she decided to come on full time.

FAITH (Video):

It was a very smooth transition since I already knew all of my coworkers because I’d already interned there, we’d already formed that relationship. So I was able to just kind of jump right in and start learning how to actually do the stuff I’d watched for six months.

And then when units are short-staffed, I can, you know, virology, serology, I can step in and help with that process because I knew that from my internship. You could tell when you meet the different departments, they’re very passionate about what they’re doing.

And so in the newborn screening department, all of those people were working every day with a purpose because they knew their job was so important. You knew that, you know, as you’re doing these tests, it’s not just for like anything, you’re doing it to save babies.

You’re doing it to report results that are going to impact lives. I would 100% recommend this internship. It not only changed the entire course of my life and what I wanted to do as a career, but I have met amazing people, made so many good connections, and it’s the best decision I ever made.

ASHLEY WEBB:
Awesome, Perfect. Thank you. So that was one of our interns who became a full-time employee, and she’s still here. So we’re very happy with that. But we’re actually going to focus more on the labs again because they are one of our success stories with PHIG.

So it’s our Kansas Health and Environmental Laboratories, we call it KHEL, but also just the labs is what we do. So, through one of the milestones we created because of PHIG, KDHE has successfully created 3 new career ladders for this Bureau.

It’s our microbiologist series, our chemist series, and our lab tech series. With the creation of these ladders, this allows for more variety and qualified candidates applying. An example, a student fresh out of college with a bachelor’s in biology could apply and meet the qualifications fora microbiologist one.

While someone with a PhD in biology could be at a microbiologist 3 level. This also allows for more hiring flexibility for the supervisors. Some supervisors want somebody who’s fresh out of college to mold, while others would prefer somebody who needs little training. So overall, this is a quicker, more effective way to recruit and fill vacant positions so the lab can continue caring for Kansas, both people and land.

Since the PHIG flower has blossomed, as you saw in the previous slide with our interns, they successfully hired Faith in the newly established microbiologist series. As she mentioned, she is currently in our newborn screening section.

This shows a direct connection on how PHIG has touched the lives of Kansas newborns through the funds and milestones created and achieved. So we’ll have we have another video to play if you could also play that one. Again, this is just to showcase how important newborn screening is and how PHIG has affected newborns here in Kansas.

Mercedes Robinson (Video):

We get a card that has five or six blood spots on it that a nurse or doctor at the hospital collected from that baby after 24 hours, and that blood spot comes here, and then we put that under a puncher.

Right now, we are punching 9 different plates full of 96 wells, and each one of those goes on to its own assay, which will give us different information on about 34 different metabolic conditions that we screen for.

My nephew was actually screened here in the state and later diagnosed with PKU, which means his body can’t break down proteins like a normal person. My sister had to stop breastfeeding day one. Once we screened him, and his analytes were elevated. We offer any help that we can.

My department does office hours every week where the public can just get online and ask us questions, and they’ll be there to speak with a lab analyst or someone from our follow-up team. So if there’s a mom who had a screen that she didn’t understand, she can get on there, and she can ask people who actually did the screening for her.

My best day at KHEL came from our worst week here in Kansas. It was the week of Christmas, when the governor gave a couple of inclement weather days, and all state employees were off for like 5 days in a row, but my department had to be here because what we do is time critical and time sensitive.

So as long as the mail’s running and those samples are getting dropped off, we have to be able to run them. So it was just a really bad, bad inclement weather week. And we ended up catching 2 high-risk OHPs and an MCAD, which is very rare. And for that to happen on inclement weather week, where we wouldn’t necessarily have been at work, it just showed why what we were doing was important.

I do love that it’s a standard practice every day. That is one thing with labs. It’s called an SOP, standard operating procedure, which all lab analysts follow.

And with that, it takes out not necessarily the thinking behind it, but you already have this procedure set out, and you’re just there. It’s the same work every day, even if it feels different from day to day.

Sir Alexander Fleming found the first antibiotic, which is penicillin, on accident. I mean, that just stands how science happens a lot. I mean, most often than not, you get your result from a question you didn’t ask or you got a different result from a question you never thought to ask.

Every time I explain my job to someone, they’re like, I didn’t know the state either had a lab or that it’s free or that you do every baby in Kansas. So I just think that they know we’re here and that the opportunity or the things that we have available for them just as general public.

ASHLEY WEBB:

So yeah, after watching that video, it’s easy to see how important it is for our agency to fill public health vacancies like these lab positions. Time is of the essence in some of these areas. It could be very well be life or death for someone if the necessary work is not completed in a procedural, punctual fashion.

And to reiterate this, again, thanks to the funds, the pollen, and the milestones our team has created because of PHIG, our agency has found better ways to recruit and retain staff. So we’ve talked a lot about recruitment efforts and how they’ve been changed for the better.

Now we’re going to talk a little bit about retention. Due to the level of importance and variety of services KDHE provides for Kansans, it’s not only important to recruit the right staff, but it’s also important to keep them as well. Turnover affects the agency’s ability to care for the land and its people.

If we have to keep recruiting for the same positions over and over again, there are multiple issues related to time occurring. There’s time to recruit, and there’s time to train someone new. And once someone leaves, that process starts all over again.

So this means less time having someone in these critical or specialized roles, less time spent helping our people and our home. So the workforce development side of PHIG came through, so we can develop new, more effective ways of keeping staff.

And so some of the ways that we’ve done that is through possible tuition assistance. It’s only if the employees Bureau does not have the funds to help with that. And then we also provide paid development opportunities.

We have our Mental Health First Aid, Clifton Strengths, and Emerging Leadership Academy. I myself am actually a great example of one of the worker bees who has benefited through these growth incentives through the PHIG. I was able to take the Mental Health First Aid training and successfully received my Mental Health First Aid training certificate.

The wonderful thing about the certificate is that it’s not only something I can use at the workplace, but it’s also something I can take home with me for my personal life. So, as you can see here, PHIG has not only touched the lives of those that KDHE serves, but it has also touched the lives of the workers, the worker bees who are housed in this hive.

So, then, we will get to questions. But buzzing with questions. And if you don’t have any now but think of stuff later, you are more than welcome to reach out to me or Melody Hazard.

SZEPUI HUGHES:

Thank you so much for that, Ashley. And I’ll echo a comment in the chat. It’s a wonderful analogy, and you know, certainly a great way of telling the story of how you’ve been using PHIG funding to support all of these great efforts.

I’d love to open the floor now to any questions you may have. Feel free to raise your hand, and we can bring you off of mute to ask your question, or also feel free to type it in the chat or the Q&A box, and we can read it aloud for our speakers.

As we’re wait, as folks are thinking, I do have a question that came up in some of our conversations with other recipients as well. We do have questions around how do health departments begin developing relationships with universities and other partners?

Are you leveraging existing relationships or are there, you know, were there strategies that were particularly effective for you and in doing outreach and you know, and building up that that trust and relationship to get to that point where you have a symbiotic relationship? And so that’s open to, to all of our speakers here.

BRAD SUENISHI:

Well, so I started with the Hawaii State Department of Health last December. So I’m still fairly new in my role and within the department itself. As far as the University of Hawaii at Manoa, with their Hawaii public Health collaboration, they had a previous memorandum of agreement with Public Health 101 courses and whatnot, but with some other division within our department.

I think as a whole, as a department, we saw that it was valuable to have Public Health 101 and any additional professional development opportunities that they could offer. So we look to continue to foster that relationship with the Hawaii public health collaboration.

As far as the community colleges, that is a matter of reaching out to different community colleges. They have their own workforce development agencies within the universities or within the colleges themselves. And really, it was a matter of reaching out to them, to the right people, and developing those relationships. And really, yeah, just asking what could be collaborated on together. Yeah, for these sorts of things. Hope that kind of answers the question a little bit.

ASHLEY WEBB:

So, at least here at KDHE, some of these were already established before I started. However, as I said, I actually just started reaching out to people I was familiar with, like my old university, my old high school, and started out with people I was familiar with, but also something that’s extremely important. Well, there’s two things actually.

First is that some of our, some of our staff are actually professors. And so they help push our internships, get us connected with people who are looking for opportunities, or like I said, we go, we go to multiple career fairs.

So, you know, just making sure that we can go to any opportunity that we can via Handshake or one of our other local universities that has its own website for a career fair. So just making sure staying up to date on what’s going on, when they are having certain career fairs, and if we have the capacity to go.

So that’s been very helpful. Because then we network at those career fairs as well. So we meet not only just students, but we also meet with the professors.

SCOTT MURAKAMI:

So that’s how we do it, at least I think this is Scott. So we did have some pre-existing relationships with the University of Hawaii within the department, but we also have worked with them for many years just through other activities.

So we leveraged a lot of those relationships, not just on Oahu, but also on the neighbor islands, to be sure that we had the ability to deploy whatever programs that we offered statewide. You know, it’s difficult when you have, if you have to build programs that are in different locations, you don’t want to have to be building at four times the cost in our situation for the four counties that we administer.

So we work with the University of Hawaii Community College system to make sure there is this, there is even deployment over whatever system we build to be sure that we have reached all of our employees throughout the state.

SZEPUI HUGHES:

Thank you all. That’s very helpful, and I think it gives us some food for thought as everyone is thinking about strategies that may be effective for their agencies, too. I see that there’s one in the Q&A, and Ashley, I wonder if you might want to respond to that live.

The question is how KDHE, as a PHIG recipient, builds capacity within local health departments in Kansas, indirectly funded or unfunded recipients, through partnerships and resource sharing.

ASHLEY WEBB:

So our Bureau of Performance Improvement handles dispersing funds to our local health departments. So, unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot of information on that.

But if you are interested in following up regarding that, you are more than welcome to reach out to another Ashley. Her name is Ashley Wallace, and I am more than welcome to put her e-mail here in the chat. Yeah, she handles a lot of our relationships with our local health departments throughout the state.

SZEPUI HUGHES:

Thanks for that, Ashley. Any other questions or reactions?

Well, we really appreciate your time today, Scott, Brad, Ashley, really great presentations and we’ll be making these this recorded session available for folks on the PHIG website as well. And if folks have additional questions, please do go ahead and put them in the chat and we’ll be sure to forward those on as well.

You know, as we come to the conclusion of this session, would love to ask you all to take a moment to. Fill out our evaluation either now or save that link for later. We’ll also be sending it out to folks in a follow up e-mail as well.

And it would really help the national partners as we’re planning future convenings, thinking about what worked, areas for improvement. So please do share your comments with us.

Also want to remind you all that we will have those recorded sessions available by sometime in early December. So please keep a look out for that. You can currently look for the recordings that you may have missed back in August on Cvent.

They are still available there as well. So thank you all for, you know, participating today. And we do have a quick video to share with you all, as well as a thank you.

The Public Health Infrastructure grant has provided a lot of opportunity to think outside of the box and think through more innovative solutions on how we can get the right people, the right information at the right time to make informed decisions.

If folks are doubting the effectiveness of the big dollars, I want them to look around at their local agencies and their state agencies and see the amazing work that’s being done with this money.

All right. Well, thank you all so much for joining us again. I’ll hang on for a few minutes if folks have any questions.

But you know, I would just love to continue the conversations with you and all of our various spaces, our pair networks, our online communities, communities of practice, really just encourage you all to stay connected. Subscribe to our PHIG newsletter, and please share the links with your teams as well.

And we’re always looking for ways to partner with you all to tell the successes of the work that we’re doing through PHIG and promising practices as well. So please do reach out to us if, if you’d like to partner.

We are looking for certainly some creative mechanisms for really telling that compelling story. And I think, as evidenced today, there’s lots of great work going on. So would love the opportunity to showcase that with you.

All right, well, thank you all, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day or evening and take care. Hope to see you again soon.