A Force for Public Health

With no public hospital and only a few public health clinics, Orange County’s Health Care Agency has a distinctly lower profile than many of its counterparts in other counties. But its responsibility for maintaining public health makes it important.

Uncertainties in the health care field and an immigrant population in the county’s urban centers mean that this agency’s work is more critical than ever. The departure this year of three top officials gives the county the opportunity to take a fresh look at the agency.

The director, Tom Uram, retired earlier this year, as did the head of the department’s mental health division, Timothy Mullins. Now Ronald DiLuigi, the agency’s acting head, has announced he is leaving Oct. 2 to take a job at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange.

One of the agency’s jobs is providing health care for abused and neglected children at the Orangewood shelter. Several years ago a county commission concluded that psychiatrists at Orangewood were prescribing medicine in overly strong doses and not keeping good records. That conclusion came after the county tried to bar access to some Orangewood records and insisted there was nothing wrong. Clearly, this is an area that bears continued monitoring.

On Saturday, an 8-year-old student at Pio Pico Elementary School in Santa Ana died of bacterial meningitis. That is the kind of incident that requires the Health Care Agency’s assistance. In this case and in the death last week of a 13-year-old in Cypress from the same cause, the department was able to advise schools on what information to provide to students, parents and teachers on how the disease can spread (by contact with an infected person’s saliva) and how to minimize transmission.

Most of the Health Care Agency’s funding comes from the state and federal governments, but county officials do need to monitor its operations. The new agency head should work to open the lines of communication with doctors, patients groups and the Board of Supervisors.