Hartford HHS director details new respiratory-illness dashboard, CHIP work and accreditation steps

Ebony Jackson Shahid, Hartford’s director of Health and Human Services, told the City Health and Human Services Committee on March 30 that the department’s epidemiology division is fully staffed and has completed a respiratory-illness dashboard that will be presented at the cabinet meeting the following day. “We are fully staffed at this particular moment. So we do have 2 epidemiologists for the city,” Jackson Shahid said.

Jackson Shahid described the dashboard as an interactive tool intended to give the public near–real-time case counts and allow users to cross-tabulate by race and gender; she said ZIP-code–level granularity is a future goal. She also said the department plans additional dashboards for environmental health and other disease-surveillance needs and called the visualizations important for transparency and for meeting accreditation requirements.

The director said the department is completing a community health improvement plan (CHIP), a multi-year strategy—she described the CHIP as typically covering three to five years—based on the community health assessment. “When the CHIP is complete, we can also…present at the cabinet meeting,” Jackson Shahid said, and offered to present progress to the council committee at a future meeting.

Committee members pressed on emergency-preparedness planning and staffing. Jackson Shahid said the city’s overarching emergency-management plan exists but that FAB (the accrediting body referenced in the discussion) expects a department-specific emergency-preparedness plan. She said the emergency-preparedness coordinator post has been vacant for two months and that the job has been posted. The director said staff and the epidemiologists have been covering portions of the preparedness reporting and that Chief Barco, the city emergency manager, has been attending required regional meetings.

Jackson Shahid described the accreditation timeline as extended after federal changes and urged the committee that the department does not want to wait until the last minute to complete documentation and plans. She offered to bring the epidemiology team for a detailed presentation at a future committee meeting so members can see step-by-step progress.

The committee did not take formal action on the presentation; members thanked Jackson Shahid for the update and asked for a follow-up presentation on the plan’s development and staffing status.