Key employees responsible for monitoring infectious diseases, providing health care and connecting residents of the most populated county in UTAH to services are on the way to the health department of Salt Lake.
The reason: A Trump administration decision this week to recover $ 11.4 billion in funding linked to COVID-19 national and local health services across the country. Although money has been distributed in response to the pandemic, not all funds support specific work. The funding was to continue until next year.
In the county of Salt Lake, it forced the layoffs of 17 employees, including epidemiologists, nurses and community health workers. It is not easy to absorb “the loss of these experts, said spokesperson Nicholas Rupp because the ministry tries to protect public health.
“It will be difficult. We are going to cover these areas as best we can,” said Rupp. “… The loss of epidemiologists means that the remaining epidemiologists will have more diseases to follow, right? It is the same amount of work spread over fewer people.”
At the UTAH Ministry of Health and Social Services, the jobs of 37 employees in positions financed by the core -related subsidies will end on April 11, the agency announced on Friday. The state said it expected to receive around $ 98 million additional dollars before the finance period in 2026.
A total of 187 personnel positions, many temporary, were partially or completely funded by six grants related to the coronavirus that UTAH has received and have now ended, he said.
Director Tracy Gruber said the agency was “sorry to see these positions end early. We consider them all the heroes of public health, many of which joined our department when we had to increase operations to ensure the safety of the UTAHNS during the world pandemic. These staff members came to serve the public for an incredibly difficult period. ”
Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Vaccinations COVVI-19 provided by the County Health Department of Salt LAKE in the Rancho Market parking lot on Redwood Road, January 6, 2022.
In an email obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune, the spokesperson for the department, Joe Dougherty, told employees on Friday that the federal government’s decision to end these funds “was not entirely unexpected, but the calendar was”.
“The lack of warning of the announcement causes challenges through the department when we continue to maintain our operations,” he wrote. “But we know that the staff and our external partners carry the real stress and the fear of the sudden decisions of our federal partners,” continued Dougherty. “Sudden action is disappointing and not what we expect from our partners.”
During the days that followed the department “received the news”, he said that the officials had “analyzed the impact and expected to see if the decision would be reversed”. This was not the case – and the email shared the new personnel cuts.
The federal cuts on the whole were in mind for health workers, said Carrie Butler, executive director of UTAH Public Health Association. Seventy to 90% of UTAH funding for public health comes from the federal government; A large part of it in the centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, she said.
One of the largest impacts in the federal cuts will be monitoring infectious diseases, she predicted. It is “very frightening, especially since we see emerging threats,” she said. The result will be that public health establishments will be “on defense”, she said, and less ready to prevent diseases before turning into more important and more expensive problems.
Utah public health layoffs
Here is the number of public health workers dismissed in UTAH.
• Department of Health and Human Services, on a state scale: 37
• Bear River Department of Health: 5
• Health Department of County Salt Lake: 17
• Southeast Utah Health Department: 2
• Department of Health in South West Utah: 5
• Summit County Health Department: 1
These departments do not provide for layoffs: the counties of Weber-Morgan, Utah, San Juan and Wasatch, and the Central Health Department of Utah.
The Davis County Health Department is undecided. Other departments did not respond to requests from the Salt Lake Tribune.
It is not clear if the Trump administration has the power to unilaterally take the financing linked to the trash – appropriate by the congress – The hill reported this week. Other similar cancellations of grants have led to prosecution and that the States said they were considering their options, the hill said.
“The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and the HHS will no longer waste billions of dollars of taxpayers who respond to an nonexistent pandemic that the Americans have changed years ago,” the United States Ministry of Health and Social Services said in a press release Reported by the Associated Press.
Releases, service discounts in UTAH counties
Public Health Association had already had to abandon an employee who was developing a training and certification program for community health workers, professionals who help UTAHNS navigate and connect to health care, said Butler.
These are the kinds of employees that the Bear River Health Department said it had dismissed. They worked in programs that help residents access the care, mental health and treatment of drug addiction to vaccinations and new parents’ home visits. The department serves more than 160,000 people in the counties of Box Elder, Cache and Rich, according to its website.
The Southwest Utah Public Health Department has dismissed five employees this week, confirmed spokesperson David Heaton. He serves the counties of Beaver, Garfield, Iron, Kane and Washington.
Employees were “mainly community health agents hired during the cocovated period to do work -capped work,” said Cameron Mitchell, head of deputy health of the department. They always did a job directly linked to Covid, but generally helped special populations, said Mitchell.
“Their main objective was to reach out to the community to try to make sure everyone was served,” said Mitchell, who sometimes included dental clinics and safety controls for children’s car seats.
Although it was “a little unexpected that the federal government withdrew the money so quickly,” said Mitchell, the staff members knew they were in temporary positions. Some had worked for the department “for a year or two and had established relations with staff and community partners. So there were frustrations, for sure, “he said.
Summit County health officials dismissed a staff member and abandoned a program related to the pandemic, spokesman Derek Siddoway said in a statement. The cuts were necessary due to the “steep end of funding,” he said, even if the ministry had budget by the budget “to reflect the limited nature in the time of these federal funds”.
The Southeast Utah Health Department has dismissed two community health workers. “This indirectly affects us in that we will do everything in our power to cover these roles, but it is a huge loss,” said the department spokesperson Brittney Garff.
Davis County still determines whether there will be layoffs or cuts in the programs, said the spokesman for the Ministry of Health, Trevor Warner. “There will be an impact because of the cuts. We just don’t know what the scale will be,” he said.
The Departments of the County of Utah, Weber-Morgan, Wasatch and the County of San Juan, and the Central Health Department of Utah, all said that they did not dismiss the staff.
The County of Utah “made a concerted effort not to count on topped funds, moving forward at the beginning of 2024, and the health service followed suit,” said spokesman Aislynn Tolman-Hill.
The Central Department of Utah serves six counties: Juab, Millard, Paiute, Sanpete, Sevier and Wayne. Although it “will reduce certain programs and operations, we will not make layoffs or a reduction in force,” said a spokesperson.
The spokesperson for the departments of Weber-Morgan and the County of Wasatch said that the cuts had “accelerated” their planning or their transitions, but they were able to adapt without layoffs. Mike Moulton, Acting Director of San Juan County Public Health, said that he should “realign certain professional responsibilities”, but “in the foreseeable future, we do not plan any layoff or reduction of program”.
Has an impact far beyond covid
Funding from the pandemic era has supported programs such as smoking cessation and improving maternal results, explained Butler, as programs have a direct relationship with the pandemic response. They attack “comorbidities” – or to the diseases and conditions that a person experiences that ultimately make them more sick than they would be if they were only sick or other emerging disease.
“And so when we say that it is just cocovated funding, what it really means is that we lose critical infrastructure construction funds,” said Butler. “And when we finance the programming linked to the cochery, we also finance all the programs and scenarios related to public health, which means that we are preparing for the next thing.”
“Covid killed a lot of people in Utah,” she added. “… We are not talking about it because what we automatically think is:” Oh, they had a preexisting condition. “Well, these pre -existing conditions that people then died of Covid because are all avoidable – not all, but many of them.”
An epidemiologist who is dismissed from the state agreed that this broad support was still necessary. “We still have an influenza epidemiologist, we have an epidemiologist of measles, we have an epidemiologist of hepatitis,” they said. “None of these elements necessarily have, you know, huge pandemics, but you do not get rid of the expert in the matter simply because there is no current emergency.”
The Salt Lake Tribune has agreed not to identify the epidemiologist because the outgoing employee is concerned about the fact that being appointed could cause reprisals or affecting his job search. They shared their opinion of separation with the gallery.
Public health officers “really like that we can serve our community, and I hope that the public service is something more than people could do, no less, with this great reduction that occurs everywhere,” they said. “I think that serving your community is patriotic, and I am really sad that it is discouraged at the moment and that people are so badly treated.”