The Montezuma County Public Health Department was crowded Tuesday afternoon with people looking to learn more about the services offered there.
All the department staff worked together to put on an open house designed to show the community what they do, setting up booths and displays for each program. As an extra incentive, guests who stopped at every booth could enter a raffle to win a gift basket.
Health department staff said the number of people who came exceeded expectations, though only time will tell if the open house will lead to more enrollment in health programs.
“I’m so impressed,” Bobbi Lock, the department director, said of the crowd. “We weren’t sure how many people we’d get, but this is great.”
Some of the programs on display at the event were relatively new, like the Baby and Me Tobacco Free program, which offers incentives for pregnant women to quit smoking, and has only been available in Montezuma County since 2014. Others have been around for years, like the Women, Infants and Children nutrition assistance program, which currently serves more than 680 people countywide.
Donna Pettingill, who has been part of WIC for more than 20 years, said it’s different from many of the other food assistance programs available in the county.
“It’s not a welfare program – in fact it actually saves the country a lot of money,” she said. “Families (who use WIC) are generally healthier, because we help educate them.”
Car seat technicians, long-term care physicians, behavioral health counselors and more handed out information on their services.
Some of the lesser-known parts of the department were also in attendance, like environmental health specialist Melissa Mathews, whose booth promoted her efforts to monitor disease spread by wildlife, as well as help people properly dispose of waste tires, which she said is an often-overlooked service.
“I’m really struggling with that, because people still load them up in the back of the vehicle and take them home and let them accumulate,” she said.
Almost all the health department’s programs are funded by the federal or state government, so many of them are free, like blood pressure and cardiovascular screenings.
Lock said each member of the department contributed something to the open house, whether it was creating interactive displays for their booths or baking the homemade refreshments in the lobby. She hopes to make it an annual event from now on.
