As the Maine Legislature gets closer to deciding on what to do with a diminished health program that helps Maine’s infants and people with infectious diseases, the state agency charged with protecting Maine’s health has repeatedly failed to give lawmakers, and others, public information that could inform their course of action.
Last month, a legislative aide for state Sen. Brownie Carson emailed a Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention staff member with a straightforward request: He sought copies of two public reports prepared by a national health organization that accredited Maine’s public health nursing program in 2009 and again in 2012.
The CDC staff member, who works for Maine’s public health nursing program, responded the same afternoon, April 19: “I forwarded your document request to my administrative superiors (Deb Wigand, Maryanne Harakall, Stacy Thibodeau) this morning. I have not been authorized to respond to your request.”
Carson, a Democrat from Harpswell, still hasn’t received a copy of either report.
The experience of requesting public information and not receiving it has become the norm in recent months for Carson and others who have sought details and basic documents about public health nursing from the Maine CDC, an office within the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.
Carson is sponsoring legislation this year that would restore Maine’s corps of state-employed nurses whose responsibilities include preventing the spread of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, responding to disease outbreaks and public health emergencies, and improving the health of moms and their newborns by visiting them in their homes.
The legislation, LD 1108, follows several years in which the LePage administration has left nurse positions vacant even as the Legislature has appropriated funds to fill them. When Gov. Paul LePage took office in 2011, Maine employed about 50 public health nurses spread across the state. Earlier this year, according to the Legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal and Program Review, only 23 of the program’s 48 funded positions — fewer than half — were filled.
The County is pleased to feature content from our sister company, Bangor Daily News. To read the rest of “DHHS has blocked lawmakers from public data on nursing program,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Matthew Stone, please follow this link to the BDN online.
