Mecklenburg health director on challenges and the future

MECKLENBURG COUNTY

Mecklenburg County public health director Dr. Kimberly Scott has been with the department since 2022. She was named interim director in January and promoted to the job on a permanent basis earlier this month.

Dr. Kimberly Scott is Mecklenburg County’s new health director, but no stranger to the department she supervises.

Before her appointment on a permanent basis earlier this month, she was interim director and before that, assistant director of the Population Health Division since 2022, where she was responsible for resources to design, implement, and evaluate programs and initiatives. She was also tasked with building relationships between the health department and community partners, increasing access to local health priority data, and overseeing the Offices of Chronic Disease Policy and Prevention, Violence Prevention, and Health Equity. 

In an interview with The Post, Scott detailed how she made the transition to permanent full-time director, challenges facing public health and community-based initiatives to improve health in Mecklenburg. Responses are edited for brevity and clarity.

CP: In terms of going from interim director to permanent full-time director what does it entails for you in terms of your career?
KS: Even after working within the Mecklenburg County Public Health Department for years and serving in this interim capacity, I think the scope can still surprise you because on any given day, our team may be responding to a communicable disease that's impacting the community or helping a mother that needs access to WIC, or providing care to our clients who are visiting our clinics, to supporting the schools with school health nurses.

Our work is so broad and so vast that no day looks the same within public health. And there's so many people that may never know the work of public health because when public health works well, oftentimes it goes unnoticed. So, one thing that has just been just a beautiful experience for me, despite being here for so long, is to just see the broader layers of our department beyond my old scope of work, and to just see how dedicated our staff are to making sure that we are building systems so that our community can have experience, good health in the best way possible.

CP: Because you have been with the department for a while, unlike somebody who might have been hired from outside, there is no breaking in period. You already know Mecklenburg and the department intimately, so there is no honeymoon phase.

KS: I think that’s true. There is an advantage to knowing our staff, our partners, and the community, and being able to step in without needing that additional time to learn systems, which can be challenging in any role. But it’s definitely a different scope of work when we think about the vastness of stepping into broader responsibilities from an assistant to serving as health director, so I don’t take that responsibility lightly. I have been spending a significant amount of time engaging with our staff to learn more about our work and our programs to support me in thinking about how we support the entire system and network so that we can continue to do good work and build on the foundational work that we've done for years.

CP: Talk a little bit about the state of public health in Mecklenburg County, especially when it compares to nationally, where there is a lot of confusion or reversals in terms of public health positions by the federal government.

KS: In thinking about the state of public health in Mecklenburg County, one thing I have to share is that our team has done a phenomenal job, really ignited by COVID to expand our trust and visibility within the community, because to the point of earlier comments, you know, oftentimes when we think about public health, it’s often on the back burner when things are going well. We’ve amped up our community engagement.

We have programs and initiatives that span efforts from food security support to youth development and violence prevention, and things that people might not typically associate with public health, and that’s a broad part of our community building approach to make sure that our community knows us, so that when there are issues, people trust and can connect with us, and know that we can be a valid resource for helping them make informed decisions and understand the issues that are impacting community.

CP: You’ve worked on initiatives that included data, and is because of that experience, do you consider yourself a bit of a data nerd where this is part of this is part of what makes up that experience and prepared you for this job because you have such a rich background in numbers and data and what it means to health?

KS: I think working in public health, you have to be a data nerd because in order to make informed and wise decisions, you have to understand what’s going on around you. Data is not always in the form of numbers or complex statistics, but it’s stories. That qualitative experience, making sure that we understand the number, the detail behind the numbers. Understanding what it’s like for a family to navigate not having access to transportation, to try to get to a doctor’s appointment, or to try to access food. All of those things provide rich context to understand why our community experiences health the way it is.

CP: What’s the biggest challenge for Mecklenburg and the health department, understanding that it’s more than a million people in the county. There’s more than a million stories and more than a million health data points.

KS: I think it’s a combination of things. One thing that I’d emphasize first is how quickly our community is growing. We know our community is growing rapidly. It’s diversifying very quickly, and our health department is not growing at the same speed of community. We are constantly trying to understand what that growth looks like in our community, so that we can leverage the resources we have to support our growing community.

That helps us lean into our partnerships, looking at how we work with our partner network to leverage our resources and connect to provide support services across the entire county. It’s critically important for us to have those strong partnership relationships because we know that at the pace the county is growing at our current capacity, we definitely need to lean into our support network to ensure that we meet the needs of our growing community. And beyond that, you know, public health again is always charged with making sure that we can respond to the threats of disease and other things that might impact our community.

CP: You mentioned earlier that … health isn’t the same everywhere you go. Over the years the county’s had initiatives, especially in the Black community, to deal with hypertension, and things that impact Black folks on an uneven basis. Where is the county now growing those partnerships?

KS: Especially in recent years, we have expanded our portfolio of community support programs. We still execute one of our longstanding programs, Village HeartBeat, which is a partnership with the faith community that focuses on chronic disease prevention and management for some who might already be diagnosed with chronic diseases through structured programs that provide wellness support. We provide pre- and post-health screenings so that people can know their numbers and just a variety of resources to help them on their health journeys based on the results of those health screenings. Tailored experiences might include gym memberships, access to health educators or other support resources, so that people can make healthy and informed decisions based on their individual experiences. We’ve since scaled up those programs to support a broader community beyond just our faith network. 

We’ve launched a community mini grant program for organizations and faith community that are working in our priority areas to tackle chronic disease issues, anything from diabetes prevention support to making sure that people have access to healthy food, reducing tobacco exposure. We have been investing in nonprofits and small organizations, grassroots organizations, to provide them with resources to help build on the network of resources that are available to our community to support them in that capacity, we've also launched a new initiative over the last couple of years, which is what we call our Community Capacity Building Institute, and that’s for our smaller nonprofits that are doing great work, but they need support scaling up some of their work, or they have a good idea, but maybe they need help with coordinating a business plan, or need help coordinating evaluation resources so that they can be competitive for other funding sources and opportunities to scale their work.

CP: What’s the future of public health, specifically in Mecklenburg County?

KS: One thing that we know is certain that the future of public health is that it’s changing. It’s uncertain in a lot of ways for us right now because there are many factors outside of the control of the boundaries of a county, but what we do know is certain is that we have a strong workforce that’s ready to respond and ready to support the needs of Mecklenburg County. So, our team is constantly staying abreast of any changes that might impact our community. We are constantly thinking about how we can build our workforce to support our growing and changing community so that we can respond. That’s what public health does. 

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