Kane County Health Department Director of Health Promotion Theresa Heaton displays the two Model Practice Awards presented to the Health Department at the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) annual conference last week in Kansas City. Theresa is flanked by NACCHO President Dr. Swannie Jett, right, and NACCHO Executive Director LaMar Hasbrouck, left.

The Kane County Health Department was awarded two Model Practice Awards at the recent National Association of County and City Health Officials annual conference in Kansas City July 7-9. The Health Department’s two awards were among 19 total awards presented nationwide, and this is the fourth year in a row Kane County received Model Practice recognition.

According to the NACCHO website: “These programs were reviewed by a committee of peers (other local health department professionals) and were determined to be initiative programs, resources, administrative practices, or tools that demonstrates exemplary and replicable qualities in response to a local public health need. A model practice meets the following criteria: local health department (LHD) role, collaboration, innovation, responsiveness, and evaluation (both process and outcome). A promising practice exhibits the potential to become a model practice.”

“We are honored to have been chosen from the many entries nationwide,” said Barbara Jeffers, Health Department Executive Director. “This recognition acknowledges our commitment to continuously improving, and we hope can serve as models for other departments to follow.”

The two programs that received the awards are described below:

Assessing and Improving Routine Food Inspection Report Completeness

The Environmental Health Staff standardized the process for how routine food inspection forms are filled out. Toward this end, the staff developed criteria that led to the creation of a checklist to use to review inspections for consistency. Previously there was not a system developed to standardize how the forms were being filled out, so the project created an opportunity to improve the quality of reports being given to food establishments, increased standardization among inspectors, and increased food safety by providing more detailed and completed reports for the food service owners and operators.

The goal was to increase in the percentage of completely written inspection reports, and the new process saw an increase from the baseline of 42% to 75% at the end of the PDCA cycle, which was deemed a success by the team.

Implementing Quality Improvement Projects with Medical Providers to Increase Smoking Cessation among Low Income Patients.

Smoking rates in Kane County are quite low at 12%, however rates among residents living in poverty were identified as being nearly three times that. A strategy was sought that could engage medical providers at the system level to improve how resources are provided to low income tobacco users. In January of 2014, projects were undertaken with three medical providers (two hospitals and a Federally Qualified Healthcare Center) to formally implement quality improvement projects to increase smoking cessation attempts and utilization of the Illinois Tobacco Free Quitline among their patients. The health department utilized tobacco funding provided by the Illinois Department of Public Health to offer modest incentives for medical providers to conduct QI projects using the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) methodology. The department provided technical assistance to the providers and guided them as they worked through their own PDCAs. The interventions included implementing a training program for staff and physicians, creating a health screening process for parents at a children’s vaccine clinic and conducting follow-up calls to tobacco using patients after their visits. In addition to the increased cessation attempts noted in each case, another benefit was the expansion of the health department’s QI culture out into the community in an effort to better serve the most vulnerable in the population.

More information about NACCHO’s Model Practice awards is available at www.naccho.org/topics/modelpractices.