Houston Health Department

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  1. The Houston Health Department handles health initiatives at the city level. They are being profiled because they run health programs for the city of Houston.
  2. The Houston Health Department runs the Healthy Homes Program, where homes are inspected for asthma triggers and other harmful materials. The program also seeks to educate people on how to prevent these household toxins from building up to dangerous levels. They also provide general information about asthma and prevention techniques on their website.
  3. In 2012, Pittsburgh started offering free home inspections, but only for families who have children that have health issues relating to lead poisoning. The Houston Health Department does not give the year that the program started, but home inspection programs run by state health departments are not uncommon, and the CDC even offers funding for these inspections as well.
  4. They do not suggest anything new or radical, but the fact that the city of Houston runs the home inspections as opposed to the Texas Department of State Health Services suggests a different social climate or power structure, since in places like Minnesota and New York, the state health departments manage home inspections.
  5. The city department collects its own data about things like air pollution complaints and patient distress levels. They then organize it into mostly bar graphs on a community health profile that covers a three year period.
  6. The Houston Health Department has drawn upon research and statistics from the CDC and WHO. They also draw upon their own data taken from the Houston Health Department and other departments within the city.
  7. The Houston Health Department runs about five or so clinics in Houston that offer various health services, such as STD testing and tuberculosis treatment.
  8. The department is located in a conservative state, but the city of Houston is more liberal in comparison. This means that the city's programs often follow that ideology and can sometimes conflict with the directives from the state department.
  9. Seeing the millions of dollars spent on asthma related hospital visits in cases that were described as 'preventable' by the Texas Department of State Health Services has influenced the department's way of thinking about preventative healthcare.
  10. They are funded by the taxpayers, so they are liable to provide services that most benefit the citizens of Houston.
  11. The fact that this group is publicly funded shaped the way that it thinks, since it is more inclined to listen to its funding base. Since Houston is more liberal, that means it will get more requests to do things geared towards helping the environment.
  12. This group does find dealing with the state level government to be challenging, as the local level policies do not always agree with what the state department has planned.
  13. They call for a more liberal governance, since the state health department is unwilling to adopt some of Houston's health policies, such as offering asthma medications for zero co-pay.
  14. The Asthma Files can supplement this group by analyzing the results of their new healthcare system and whether or not offering medications saves the city money on healthcare expenditures.