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Date: 9/15/2021
EASTHAMPTON – The Easthampton Health Department announced at the end of August that Amy Hardt would be leaving her position as the city’s public health nurse.
In a Facebook post in conjunction with her final weekly COVID-19 dashboard update, Hardt said that she was leaving to spearhead a new program in the Berkshires.
“The state has funded a number of regional shared public health services grants, and I am heading up a new program in the Berkshires,” Hardt said. “It has been such a pleasure to get to know and work with so many of Easthampton's residents and community leaders.”
Hardt is best known in the city for creating a weekly COVID-19 dashboard earlier this spring that displays detailed, easy-to-read data about what positivity rates look like on a weekly basis in Easthampton, the total number of cases in Easthampton and what vaccination rates look like in the 01027 area, among other statistics. She began working part-time for the city late in 2020, but shifted to a full-time position in early 2021. Hardt came up with the dashboard idea after seeing something similar happening in Brockton.
“Amy jumped right into the position mid-pandemic without any hesitation,” the department’s Facebook post read. “Not being from Easthampton, Amy quickly made contacts within the city with local businesses, city-employees, etc. Amy conducted all of our contact tracing, sat on our COVID response team with the school district, supported our vaccine clinics, provided technical assistance to the public, and created these extremely helpful dashboards each week.”
For the time being, epidemiologist and college professor Megan Ward Harvey-who also has sat on the city’s COVID-19 response team-will continue to administer the dashboard on a weekly basis.
According to Bri Eichstaedt, the city’s public health director, she and Mayor Nicole LaChapelle met on Sept. 13 to strategize ways to recruit another public health nurse. She noted during a Sept. 8 Board of Health meeting that making it a contracted position could be an option, but that is just an idea at the moment. She said that South Hadley reached out to her for the possibility of collaborating with two 20-hour-a-week positions, and Board of Health member Aimee Petrosky noted that this could result in a shared services program that the state is heavily pushing at the moment.
“We need somebody in-house to assist me with data collection, schools, our school COVID task force that I’m on,” said Eichstaedt, during the Sept. 8 Board of Health meeting. “Amy was just such a huge resource … we’re feeling that loss right now.”
Petrosky also stressed the public health nurse position as a broader resource beyond COVID-19.
“Once the pandemic is gone, there are still other things that this position could work on,” said Petrosky. “When you move past the pandemic, and you think about, ‘how can we really elevate the health of the residents of Easthampton…if we can start to create the framework for how we are going to be able to do that, the state is going to fund us.”