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Mobilizing health and emergency personnel good learning experience
AUSTINTOWN
During the past few weeks, the Mahoning County Health Department, while not having any cases of Ebola, did a lot of contact tracing.
“Thankfully, there was no Ebola case in Mahoning County,” said Joseph Diorio, community health director.
He said, however, preparing for the possibility of an Ebola case and the contact tracing, which is finding the people who potentially had contact with a person with Ebola, were good learning experiences that will serve the health district and other area health officials well should other infectious-disease issues arise.
Diorio said at the end of the 21-day monitoring period for people who may have been exposed to Ebola, public health, clinical health and emergency personnel, were called together for a debriefing.
“We wanted to go over what we did and what we could have done better,” Diorio said at Wednesday’s health board meeting.
Diana Colaianni, director of nursing, said it was also a good learning experience for the public-health nurses who were involved in contact tracing.
Colaianni, who has been nursing director since 1995, is retiring effective Nov. 30. Her resignation was accepted “with many regrets,” said board member Margot Baird.
The board approved using grant money to send several staff members to the Ohio Infant Mortality Summit in Columbus on Dec. 2-3.
The Vindicator reported in September that Ohio’s black infant-mortality rate is the worst in the nation, and that the state ranks 47th or 48th for all deaths of infants in their first year of life.