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it's described as a state investment in local public health and an initiative that will transform public health in Indiana.

It's the outcome of legislation in 2023 with funds intended to go to county health departments to improve resources and address critical needs in partnership with elected officials, hospitals, clinics and schools.

>> And we'll learn more about the impact of this initiative known as Health First Indiana.

>> This week's prime time.

And good evening.

I'm Bruce Hayes.

Our guests today are Mindy Walton, administrator and deputy health commissioner of the Allen County Health Department and with Mindy is Marilyn Haesung, East L.A. County School Superintendent and 8th District Democratic State representing the field.

She quit and we're glad you're here as well.

If you have a question or comment you'd like to share during the conversation, please feel free to dial it in with the numbers you see there on the screen as we say hello to Mindy Fill in Maryland.

>> Happy New Year.

Same TV you didn't hear that greeting goes on for a little while I think which is a good thing and what a good new year for those involved in all of Indiana's counties in concert with their local communities as there is a proactive initiative in the unfolding for a lot of folks perhaps they're really wanting to go back to this future and wonder when Health First Indiana came to be what's what's the back story on what we're talking about today?

>> Sure.

So it started after the or through the governor's health commission.

Governor Hogan put together a commission made up of some of the physicians, other health care organizations, local health departments to discuss the public health infrastructure and it was a year long type of group that met talking about the issues, the needs changes that might make us better, more proactive in Indiana, especially on the heels of Kovik.

The outcomes of that or a very large report that talked about the ways to better public health in Indiana and specifically through county health departments and other organizations and that resulted in historic legislation thanks to all of our legislators in twenty twenty three as you referenced the funding unprecedented funding to local health departments in Indiana.

We've been at the you know forty eight or so mark in the United States for the states for public health and preventive medicine and we're going to take a huge leap with this.

So that was in twenty twenty three.

The funding came in twenty twenty four and now we're starting some of these important initiatives well and twenty twenty five it all rolls out across all counties as I understand it feel getting something like this funded is something certainly to in its inaugural term or tour of duty is quite an accomplishment legislatively it really is.

It's something that a lot of legislators including myself we've been asking for this funding for a long time recognizing Indiana ranks with regard to the health care measurements compared to other states across the country and we haven't even been very good quite honestly.

So this is very happy to support the legislation.

Very pleased that Governor Holcomb decided to push for this.

I said this a couple of times.

One of the things I think of many things besides learning how to get on Zouma but because of covid you know, was that really when you looked around the state and some of our counties?

Not so much, Allen not so much.

The larger counties but the smaller counties really had a hard time I believe with their kind of with their health department administering things.

And I think covid really sort of highlighted that if if we didn't really already know where we were and where we were ranked on some of those measurements as I mentioned earlier, certainly covid exposed them a lot more and it was sort of the impetus I think to get folks moving and drive that number and that was while it wasn't quite what we asked for but you can't always get everything that you want.

It was very close to the amount.

>> So we're happy with the amount of dollars.

What is it about this initiative that is transformative that it sort of says we're going to take a road less traveled or maybe not traveled much at all with with funding it goes to counties some may see well then our work is done but what is it that that takes it to a next level?

>> Well, to put a few things in perspective, we as local health departments in Indiana most of our money is either from tax money so property taxes and that varies in the county.

So you have different levels of services provided or able to be provided in areas based on property tax monies.

A lot of people used to seek grants for local health and that was for your health care.

We would seek grants to provide preventive services and then we got a very small amount of state funding so to give you an idea in and on county we we received enough that would cover 52 cents per capita in Allen County until I was probably 30 or 40 years until last year we took a jump into all of the twelve dollar range and now we will be double that this coming year.

So a couple pieces of candy amount is what we put into public health before for prevention health departments.

Until then we're simply doing the statutory duties of a lot of inspection duties and some of the enforcement duties and very important environmental duties.

However, we weren't able to involve ourselves in the preventive services through health care.

So the things that prevent you from having chronic disease such as obesity or diabetes and some of our fatality review data it all comes from the things that we're not doing well and we have ranked low for a number of years.

So a lot of these services and the things that come with the money are requirements of things that we need to do and it's aimed at getting into the areas about maternal child health , the things where we're low in a lot of our outcomes we can now put in funnel money in to organizations that are working in these areas or ourselves deploy services.

It's first of its time in Indiana to be able to do those things.

>> And in the review of those it seems that in that core at least one is you say box needed to be checked and maternal and child health chronic disease prevention mainly obesity and smoking and vaping prevention infestation.

So how were the funds in Allen County allocate allocated?

>> Well the the money itself was allocated per population in your county so Allen County being third largest of the counties did get a large amount.

So we started out with about a four point six million and that's a very large for us.

And so what came as I said there were core public health duty areas or core health areas that we have to provide services in or ensure that they are provided in your area.

So we did deploy services in all those areas areas you mentioned in a number of them there are two areas we decided though to develop a grant program so that we could come alongside some of the organizations who have taken on these duties for years and are already doing maternal child health , prenatal care, chronic health issues came alongside them, funded them up a little bit, augmented some of their services and so we were able to choose it's the way it was designed was as long as those services are provided in your community, however that community and your elected officials see fit it can be done so we decided to do ours through a bit of a hybrid plan of us deploying services working alongside organizations, through grant programs.

And then as we're sort of here to talk about today a little bit some of these outside the box larger projects is where we funneled some of our money as well.

>> Yeah.

And I wonder did the light bulb then Maryland come over the top of your head as well as Mindy simultaneously or when you're hearing this news of this initiative rolling out easy challenging to think how can education find a place at the table with this activity?

>> Well, Mindy and her team do a great job of pulling us together and when they do it they get usually a lot of the Allen County superintendent together as well as some other people from around the county and we usually brainstorm and I think that is the power of that group.

We all have similar needs.

We see similar things happening within our schools and so it's probably that brainstorming that kind of created the the whole vaping program that we have in front of us right now that we're using.

I'm really excited about the initial results that we're seeing in our district right now.

Just first semester of this school year we were already down 30 students who have not been reported vaping compared to last year.

So I think we were about one hundred and forty three and we're almost like at one 110 right now.

So it's a lot fewer students and we're excited about that and we're hoping that the program continues to yield those results.

But I would tell you that program comes from all of collaborating together.

>> Yeah, this is across all school systems.

Everyone is is funding their challenge with with this in some of the images that you've shared for the program for this evening, McMillan Health has a role apparently in this regard.

>> Well, when we met with the superintendent and said hey, what is your biggest issue?

What are you what are you currently experiencing and all having similar pain with and the number one for all of them was vaping and the issues surrounding it.

What do you do for enforcement of that?

What do you do with the confiscated materials?

How do we prevent it and educate?

And so we said if we were to provide training for you or have it, what would you what would you hope to have and some of them wanted it in school.

Some wanted the kids to go to a facility and McMillan is is a bit of a hidden gem here and they do a lot of this training.

It was already built and we're helping them build or create another age of training for some of this and they said yes, they would partner with us and be able to provide it at will wherever they wanted those things.

So we said let's set up a program we named it we created materials for it for each of the schools deployed it and they we I think we are at 6500 folks have already kids have been trained in this last six months over two hundred and twenty programs have been done.

>> A hundred and fifty more coming.

So we're very excited about it because we did deploy to all public schools.

And just to add to that a little bit it is reaching right now currently our fifth grade students and all of our schools are sixth grade students and our seventh grade students.

So we're trying to intervene at much earlier age because we're seeing the highest level of use probably in our high schools where the research says one in ten high school students generally vap those numbers are pretty high so we want to intervene early and often and try to make sure that we're creating an environment that students understand that this is not something that they should be doing here or some some images taken not long ago over at Leo I believe Leo Elementary.

>> And what's the response from from the students?

Are they they find themselves engaged in this because it's certainly been in the periphery if it hasn't been right in front of them, yes.

>> I would tell you they're very engaged and I love the way McMellon presents things because they get the students up and they get them moving.

They're asking them questions but they're also giving the students an opportunity to talk about situations that they've been in.

And I was in one of them and a student mentioned how one of their friends does it and they wanted to know how to avoid it and just to come out and ask that question and in that meeting was huge because they're looking for a peer and how do I address a peer when a peer is trying to get me to do something I know I shouldn't do.

So I love that McMillan is intervening with them and they're doing a great job.

I mean they really are and the kids are very much engaged and when we are seeing these there is also a screen shot of some of the curriculum involved that McMillan provides.

We all love the title of being able to break free from the clubs they escape.

>> Right.

And Phil, as you're seeing these symbols of activity, these representations of activity along this line, what's your take your sense of it?

>> All right.

Now this is feeling like just what we were hoping exactly because you know, in the program when we first talked about the legislation, the money there were a lot of legislators that you know what is it's a lot of money.

What are we going?

What's it going to hurt?

Is it is it going to be spent wisely?

We were hoping that all 92 counties would buy in rather quickly.

Most there were about five maybe a half a dozen holdouts but now they're on board and I think the reason they were a little skeptical as well is because they didn't want the state to come in and tell them what to do, what programs to run so when we hear about the collaboration between the health care department and the superintendents and and the things that they're doing at McMillan, which is a great program, you can see that it's really now up to the counties all across Indiana to be able to come together and do the things that they've done here in Allen County and roll out successful programs.

>> I think what we're seeing now and there are programs that also come with those KPIs the performance indicators and the metrics and all that because everyone wants to know and it's all literally baked in when it gets out to the classrooms.

>> It is and the way we ran our grant program as well as any programs that we deploy funding to whether it's to schools or health care entities or other organizations is we have to check the box of some of those KPIs or those key performance indicators that the state is looking for collectively because that our hope is that we're all deploying very similar programing so that we're targeting the issues that we know we we have troubles with in Indiana.

So we committed to ensuring the funding went to where it needed to go to the issues that we knew we were the lowest on and developed programing with a lot of these organizations and said which of these measurements do you think in your program you were doing or what we could help augment?

Could you meet same with the schools.

Everybody submits data we're tracking that we have a lot of mechanisms for developing heat maps to show where we're showing services and just anecdotally I can tell you that the funds that we received just through the first and through just the first nine months of twenty twenty four we had already served over 40000 people sought or were given or found services through an organization or an entity that was being provided money through this grant funding.

So we're seeing an impact.

We're hearing a lot of feedback and we granted twenty nine organizations a large amount of money to do a lot of things to better the health here in Harlan County.

We're pretty proud of that and the schools have really stepped up as well.

>> This could be a quilt but it is something for which perhaps your TV at home is still big enough to capture it all.

>> Tell us what we're seeing here.

Those are the twenty nine agencies that asked to be granted to help us meet those key performance measures and indicators through our funding and these are all engaged in a program or a project that is public health centric that they are experts in and that they wanted to expand but couldn't due to the lack of funding.

So when we came in and said here are the things that we're hoping to achieve with this funding, what are you doing doing they were able to step up and say oh we have always wanted to do nutrition training in the school or at a facility but we didn't have the staffing.

Could you fund that?

And so each of them are very different but they all check those boxes of the things we're hoping to achieve collaboratively.

We did site visits to each of the entities that we funded and we learned so much about all the organizations here locally that were already engaged in this work that local health really should have been doing and now we're partners in this goal and that really is a way of answering this question .

I wonder if there's any other information you would like to share in that going with nonprofits directly as opposed to providing services in the House seems that it has expedited the rollout of of these programs when you're a grantee yourself and that's how you're funding public health in your community, you're scraping together the dollars in the staff to do the things that you're required to do when you are given funds to do all of these great and preventive things.

It came it came so quickly so we didn't have the infrastructure in place.

We didn't have staffing to deploy it and really should it be things that we do maybe people trust some of the other organizations.

They feel more comfortable with their school folks.

So we did feel like a hybrid approach was best for Allen County due to our size and those that are already engaged in those things.

So it's going very well so far and for twenty twenty five will grant forty eight programs so we're nearly doubling and we've granted out over three million this year will grant out near that next year and that's all to entities who are experts in these things and didn't need to build the knowledge just needed to expand what they're doing there.

>> What's been the feedback from your colleagues at the other school systems within within the county when this topic comes up?

>> I think like I said, it's it's a topic that all of us are dealing with.

I would tell you I think all of us are starting to see some of it transpire at a younger age which before it was predominantly more high school students.

We're starting to see our junior high students and even a few elementary students involved and I tell you that gets a little scary.

The biggest thing I want to say is we need parents.

We need parents to help in this initiative.

We're going to do our best at school to do what we can and Macmillan Health obviously is partnering with us in this.

But we also need our parents to help with our students to make sure that they understand the dangers of vaping.

And again, I would tell you across the county we all saw it as an issue when we came together with Mindy it was like that was the number one thing we were all talking about.

>> So this is something that we feel very strongly about and I'll tell you Marilyn will probably chime in.

We we also felt we reached out to the schools and what else do you need and the stop the bleed CPR all of those trainings that they have to pay for have done certain hours.

We said what if we trained ourselves up and offered it for free to all schools?

And so that's not just the public schools all schools in Allen County have the opportunity.

We hired and created a position just for school and student health and that's all they're doing is helping the schools with whatever they need.

We've provided ads.

We've provided a number of pieces equipment to schools.

We've really tried to get ahead of a lot of this, get a jumpstart and provide the education especially on some of the bigger topics like the vaping and smoking issues.

>> And with that I just want to say one of the things that this person did she created a PSA and she asked them to do a video and so high school students across all of our districts could submit a video.

We had two submissions from Mr. Allen, one Eastern University and one at Woodland.

They were both accepted but the students the high school students were so involved and they were so excited to do this PSA and I think that's huge.

The kids understand that they need to make a difference and it starts with them so that was very powerful.

We brought the two students in to our board meeting and they displayed it.

They should have shared their video and they talked about how they created it.

There are so many skills that they were using during that time but also you could tell they were wrapped around a cause.

>> They understood that this was something we needed to do so stories at the state house from your colleagues on whether again the this is not just an Allen County moment.

>> Well, something bigger.

Yeah.

I mean look, I'll tell you that I mentioned before about making sure that money is spent wisely and not just not not us but that's what our constituents want us to do.

>> The second thing they want to do is try and lower costs all across wherever we can and if we could get folks healthier and do these things that are proactive, what what better way than to save on health care costs if we have a healthier society, what better way to make sure kids are going to school and the class if they're healthier and you know, you talk about vaping and I don't know how long you've been around but it wasn't around when I was in high school.

>> Know that.

And so it's one of those things that's that's new fairly new and it we have to have to keep up on.

So I, I I'm sure we probably want report and things like that how the how the money has been spent on the programs are going but um indicators look like we're we're in the right direction.

It's very good and that'll help with the next round of funding too so that's good.

>> Well let's go there briefly just to find out what you feel the prospects for health first India the funding in the budget situation this year might be well, we know look, we're not going to the federal dollars that we've had in the budget for the last two and twenty twenty one and twenty three so it can be a little bit tighter.

>> But again, I think these things are showing that investment does work and that you that we're going to save money in the long run, maybe some up front costs and that's what we've seen so far.

But I do believe that it's going to show that it's better to invest in folks health via education.

Everything that you've heard here today and I do think that's going to help us in our arguments to put much money in the budget for health care and these type of causes that we can.

So it's a good start.

>> It's a good story to have and I think it's going to be very helpful through other facets of the story as well as the vaping cessation activities continue and the focus on obesity.

But there have also been supports or other areas Jeezy's playhouse among others to talk about the yes one the other major four areas of focus was the prevention of chronic disease specifically diabetes, heart disease, the number one cause of death.

So we worked with several entities who submitted applications to work with special populations or areas of our city that maybe didn't have those services in place.

And Jig's Playhouse, for example, was one who stepped up and said hey, we'd like to deploy our nutrition and our chronic disease prevention programing to those folks with Down syndrome.

And so their program is very inspirational to see as Children's Autism Center we have Fort Wayne Community Schools who implemented nutrition cooking in their seventh grade classes enormously impactful.

So we have a variety of things happen over the major areas that we funded and also we should share blessings in a backpack impact if each of the organizations that were featured in the earlier graphic had sent one to supporting photo, we'd have to make this an hour long show and they did send them.

>> I only say but to dial and what Phil said that return on investment it's estimated to be somewhere around fourteen dollars a return for every dollar you invest in preventive health care.

And so if we extrapolate that out across the state and all the work the health departments and the State Department of Health and all of the medical organizations are doing in the schools, if we can add that all up, we know we are making an impact in that lessening of health care costs, lessening of insurance costs and lessening of productivity loss.

This is going to show over the next ten years.

So we need to invest that money.

>> We appreciate it.

You're what we're hearing too is there are some returns you can see now but there have also been those other returns which in the health field it can take years to see speak speak to that is it's such a good point because we're often asked what are the outcomes after that first year mehndi well that's probably going to be five to ten years before we'll actually see some of those unfortunate numbers rise or lower whichever they are.

So we know we have some time where we've got to hunker down, do the work and hope that those numbers get better for us.

Some of the things that we are seeing because we have required most of our energies to do pre and post test kind of see if the education has has stuck and we're starting to see really good results from some of that.

We're also seeing we're impacting a lot of zip codes that didn't have certain services in them.

Those are the tangible things we can see now.

But I suspect over the next year we hope over the next five to ten years we'll see some of our outcomes be better when we're published it being so low for being overweight or smoking costs, we hope those are bettered by some of this education we should here to as we conclude our time today that Health First Indiana has a website where if you are watching us from Dobel County or Wabash County or cubbyholes you can go right to the top of the website and click on that and get your own county's activities so everyone's yes, everyone can play.

And if you would like to find more information about what I believe is called health first Allen County, you can find that information also online by heading over to the L.A. County Health Department's website and we have a graphic for that is we want to again thank our guests this evening Mindy Walton, administrator and deputy health commissioner of the Allen County Health Department, Marilyn Haesung East L.A. County School School School superintendent and 80th district Democratic State Representative and House Minority Leader Phil Chique.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you ladies very much and thank you for joining us as well.

For everyone with Prime time on presents, take care and we'll see you next week The Kendallville Area Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, presents the National Civics Bee - Local Competition.

Essays are due February 4th and the top 20 competition is March 13th.

Details at KendallvilleChamber.com.

The Rogers Company has been conducting business in northeast Indiana since 1944 as Rogers Markets and now as The Rogers Company with commercial property and real estate development.

Pleased to support local not for profits and PBS Fort Wayne.

The Regional Chamber of Northeast Indiana.

Advocates for a world class infrastructure, a competitive business climate, 21st century talent and rural investment.

One region, one voice.

NEINAdvocates.com.