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Date: 11/24/2021
LUDLOW – With a nursing position vacant for over a year, the Ludlow Board of Selectmen discussed filling that open position with a health inspector during its Nov. 16 meeting.
To start the discussion, Health Agent Andrea Crete said a health inspector would free up her time to do more work as a department head and would not require an additional budget allocation.
“If we hired a full-time inspector to take a lot of the inspectional responsibilities off my plate, I would be able to focus on more of the department head and management type of responsibilities, including applying for grants,” she said.
Because she is the only one qualified to do health inspections in the department, Crete said it is difficult for her to juggle the inspections on top of her required duties as a department head and as a result has fallen behind on the inspections in town. She added that before her time, the department was not keeping up with the state mandated levels for inspections.
After board member Manuel Silva said he was concerned about cutting the Health Department’s nursing visitation program, Crete said that change was due to short staffing.
“We are down to one full-time public health nurse. With the reduced staffing, we had our part-time nurse retire recently. We did have another position that has been out, advertised and open for a year with no applicants,” she said.
Crete said the low salary for the open nurse position made it difficult to fill.
“The nurses have a union contract which outlines their salaries and the steps, so we really cannot make any adjustments to that salary to make it more competitive without changing the union contract which does not expire until the end of 2022,” she said.
Board member Derek DeBarge said he was against hiring a health inspector.
“I have a problem with this position. I have a problem with another inspector when the salary does not match what the Board of Health has done since its inception in this town. We take care of our citizens and a lot of that was done by our nurses and I think that should be the main focus, and not other inspectors when we have someone who can do those inspections,” he said. “I am not for this position at all.”
Despite the concerns about cutting the visiting nursing program from the board, Crete said it is not required by the state.
“It is not a state mandate or responsibility of a health department to provide visiting nursing services or home pedicures, it is something unique that this department has always done. Considering that we only have one public health nurse now, we have to look at the other responsibilities that need to be done and take that into consideration,” she said.
Crete added that there are more important issues for the Health Department than providing visitation services and should focus on the entire community, not just the elderly population.
“There are other issues in the community like COVID [-19], on the MAVEN we have incidents of high hepatitis C, these are issues that a public health nurse deals with and these are issues that have not been dealt with in the past,” she said. “With only one nurse we have to restructure what we are doing to meet the needs of the whole community.”
Select Board member Derek DeBarge argues, “I do not care what other towns do for their populations through their boards of health, I care what we do. I think it is essential to take care of our seniors and to have flu shots through the Board of Health, going through a primary care is a nightmare. I think the direction of the Board of Health needs to be reevaluated.”
After Silva suggested the decision did not come from the Board of Health, Chair Michael LaFever said it was approved by the board and added it was important to hire a health inspector.
“The most important thing we do are health inspections above everything else and that is why I agree that we need more capacity for health inspections. Keeping food establishments and the businesses that sell food safe is the most critical thing we do,” LaFever said.
The board did not make a decision on the health inspector and agreed to bring it back up during the Nov. 23 meeting once Crete provided more specific information, including the inspection numbers since COVID-19 restrictions relaxed. That meeting took place after press time and coverage of that meeting will appear in the Dec. 2 edition of The Reminder.
At the end of the meeting, the board agreed to update the town’s classification plan to include an additional van driver and activity director for the Council on Aging, two groundskeepers for Westover Municipal Golf Course, one grant writing procurement officer on the Selectmen’s budget and one lieutenant for the Police Department. With the new inclusions on the classification plan, department heads can request funding to fill those positions in their fiscal year 2023 budgets.
During the meeting, the board also announced the town is looking for residents to serve on the Screening Committee for the town administrator search and are encouraged to reach out to Human Resources Director Carrie Ribeiro via email at cribeiro@ludlow.ma.us if interested.