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New Mexico In Depth • 2022 Legislative special edition
prescription for the system
By Bryant Furlow New Mexico In Depth
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the limits of New Mexico’s understaffed and highly centralized public health system. Unlike most other states, New Mexico does not have county-based health boards. Instead, public health services like vaccination have traditionally fallen to the chronically understaffed state health department, which has struggled to contain the pandemic’s spread. “The big lesson is that we’ve underfunded public health,” said Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque. “Our infrastructure was woefully inadequate and now we’re paying the price.” That includes funding for the state’s 42 county and tribal comprehensive community health planning councils that, in the absence of local health boards, fill an important role identifying local public health gaps and needs. Many of the health coun-
Little-known councils are key to public health but chronically underfunded. Advocates hope to change that in 2022
cils have gone beyond their statutory mandates, in recent months, to pitch in with local COVID response efforts – helping to coordinate local testing and vaccination efforts, get word out to local residents about where they can get booster shots, and at times serving as an important channel of communication between state health officials and local governments. But the health councils are woefully underfunded, despite legislation passed in 2019 that expanded their mandates and directed the health department to provide them more funding. In 2022, with the state’s coffers busting at the seams, advocates and their allies in the Legislature want to see the state ensure councils’ long-term sustainability.
Boots on the ground
Health councils have been epicenters of local public health planning for more than 20 years, conducting local health needs assessments and advising local governments on solutions. (Health councils assess local health issues and help plan health care responses, but until recently, they did not deliver health care services.) They are invaluable sources of insight about local issues in the state’s often-neglected rural areas, said Rep. Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena. “They are the boots on the ground in our communities,” Armstrong said. “They know what the needs are. But a lot of people don’t even know they exist or what they’re for.” Lawmakers depend on health
councils as a reliable and objective source of information about local public health challenges, Ortiz y Pino agreed. The Rio Arriba County Health Council, for instance, was spotlighted last year by reporter Ted Alcorn in the Washington Post for its work with the Española Police Department to train officers in naloxone administration to reverse opioid overdoses. Rio Arriba County has long been an epicenter of opioid overdose deaths. “Rio Arriba was able to quickly refocus the infrastructure we’d created for addressing one epidemic, Substance Use Disorder, to combat the new pandemic, COVID-19,” Lauren Reichelt, of the Rio Arriba County Health Council, said in an interview. “We organized volunteers to make and distribute 10,000 masks, 800 gowns and hundreds of face shields throughout northern New Mexico early in the pandemic.” The health council also created Continued on 18 ➤
