This week the Illinois Department of Public Health announced that they will lose more 400 million dollars in funding. In addition to impacting the IDPH, the cuts will hit work being done by local health departments.
Wednesday evening Shawnna Rhine - Community Outreach Coordinator with the Southern 7 Health Department says they found out that the CDC had pulled money earmarked for disease prevention. Since then, they have been trying to understand the impact this will have on the 64 thousand people they serve, "For us here, we're starting to look to May, which is when we begin our West Nile Virus surveilence. We're not sure if it's going to impact that. There's a lot of unknowns in this at this point. The state has let us know that this amount of funding has been cut. It's going to take time to figure out what that looks like."
She says health departments are already underfunded and more cuts will be difficult. In addition not knowing what funding will look like makes it harder to support the people in their area, "To not be able to give them a definite answer of what this is going to look like in disease prevention services is concerning for us."
For now, the Southern Seven Health Department will continue their work. Rhine says with the uncertainty they'll keep working to understand what the future looks like. But she stresses they'll continue their work and make sure they're giving residents the best care possible, "Even though we don't know what's going on, we're going to be there for our residents to the best of our ability. Change happens and we go through change. We just want people to be patient as we work through this."
Rhine says they're appreciative of the support they've received from state leaders to help them navigate these cuts.
