A week after Lyon County commissioners made a decision on the public health contract for at least next year, a lot is still yet to finalize with the contract itself.
Regardless of the contract length or revised lists of duties and obligations, one thing that will likely change is the time spent in communication between the Flint Hills Community Health Center and Lyon County Commission. After the commission decided to put the contract out for bid in October, Commission Chair Rollie Martin said improved communication is needed moving forward, especially with pandemic matters. Health Center CEO Renee Hively agrees.
Hively says meetings between the County Commission and Health Center kept to the normal quarterly schedule and could have been held weekly to give commissioners a better sense of how the pandemic was evolving.
Commissioners used a bid process and eventually accepted bids both from the Health Center and Newman Regional Health. The hospital had submitted a $450,000 base bid per year with the ability to ask the county for more funding based on need and with the contract starting in 2022 instead of this upcoming January. The Health Center bid was for $650,000 per year, $200,000 more than the current contract, but Hively says that extra money would help the agency get to a staffing level comparable with the community need.
Hively says a lot of positions, including registered nurse, administrative assistant and sanitarian, have been “put on hold” with the contract decision pending until recently.
The most recent contract was a five-year document ending New Year’s Eve, but Hively says the Health Center has been offering public health services as the Lyon County Health Department well before the name change to Flint Hills Community Health Center in the late 1990s.
An official date for finalizing the contract has not been announced.
