New health officer takes on the job in San Benito County,
providing 10 essential services
Alvaro Garza, the new health officer for San Benito County, has
been on the job part-time since January. The doctor splits his time
between the 40-percent position in San Benito County and a
50-percent assignment as a deputy health officer in San Mateo
County.
But Garza’s experience in public health dates back longer than
his most recent assignments. The doctor, dressed in a muted orange
shirt with a colorful tie on a recent weekday, started his career
as a pediatrician in San Diego.
New health officer takes on the job in San Benito County, providing 10 essential services
Alvaro Garza, the new health officer for San Benito County, has been on the job part-time since January. The doctor splits his time between the 40-percent position in San Benito County and a 50-percent assignment as a deputy health officer in San Mateo County.
But Garza’s experience in public health dates back longer than his most recent assignments. The doctor, dressed in a muted orange shirt with a colorful tie on a recent weekday, started his career as a pediatrician in San Diego.
“Being a pediatrician is nice and gratifying, but it isn’t as challenging,” he said, of his switch to public health. “You have to know some medicine. You have to know a lot more policy, analysis, teaching, communication, epidemiology.”
When he first got interested in prevention, he took a job with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which took him to its headquarters in Atlanta. There he collected data about birth defects. From there, he had a three-year assignment with the World Health Organization. He has worked for the state department of Public Health as well as several county health departments in California. With the state, he worked with border health, which was a collaboration between agencies in border states and Mexico to prevent the spread of illnesses between the two countries.
Garza also worked at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine Medical and Education Research department in Fresno. There, his job was to work on ways to recruit more Latinos into the healthcare field.
“The numbers in medicine and other health professions is very low,” Garza said, “Even though the population of Latinos is 35-40 percent statewide.”
The percentage of Latinos working in healthcare is about 3 percent. Garza said the main goal in increasing the number of Latinos in the field is to make communication between physicians and doctors better.
“I’m an immigrant myself,” he said. “I came from Mexico at 8. I identify with access problems.”
For Garza, the purpose of public health is to provide the same essential services that doctors provide to patients – just on a greater scale.
“My clients are not one patient, but 57,000 patients,” he said. “There is the big community and then there are subgroups.”
Garza keeps a poster up in his office that lists the 10 essential services that health officers are required to provide. They include: monitoring the health of a community through birth and death records; responding to outbreaks; inform and educate the public about health problems; help mobilize the community by working with other partners; help develop policy based on issues the department has been monitoring; enforce laws related to public or environmental health; link residents to healthcare; ensure there is a confident work force; evaluate programs to see if they are efficient; and use research and evidenced-based practices.
Since he is in the office just two days a week, Garza has been using his time to get acquainted with staff members and other departments with which he will work, such as environmental health and the local law enforcement agencies. He said he is still trying to get a sense of what the local health issues are for San Benito.
“I don’t have a good sense yet,” he said. “I haven’t seen enough.”
He said he will rely on statistical analysis from the state when it is released to get a snapshot of things such as the rate of infant mortality, low birth weight, cancer, STDs and other indicators of health.
“I imagine the major issues here are similar to a lot of other counties, with chronic diseases more (prevalent) than infectious ones,” he said. “They are the ones that cause a lot more morbidity, or illness, and mortality.”
Part of the job of a health officer is to balance efforts to curb chronic illnesses with the potential threat of an infectious disease outbreak.
“We have to always be prepared for infectious disease outbreaks because they happen very quickly,” Garza said. “I make the comparison to firefighters. When you have outbreaks like H1N1, it’s like a fire. But when you prepare to respond most of the work you do is to prevent those fires – through education.”
Garza said responding to an outbreak is always a challenge, adding that he thought the state and county responses to H1N1 flu were reasonable.
“When you don’t know how bad it will be you have to respond,” Garza said. “It did mostly turn out to be not so bad, but everything we did was correct. It is better to over respond than to under respond. It is our mission to reduce these illnesses.”
In his work in San Mateo County last year, he showed his skills coordinating with other agencies during the San Bruno explosion. He was on duty over the weekend when the PG&E gas pipe exploded. He had to work with law enforcement and emergency services, as well as environmental health workers. He signed a health officer order prohibiting residents from returning to their homes until staff members were able to ensure that there were no hazardous materials or other health concerns in the homes.
Garza will continue to meet with other agencies in San Benito County, including local politicians and nonprofits, to form the connections necessary to continue with all 10 of the essential services the public health department should meet.
“I liked to see kids get better as a pediatrician,” Garza said. “Similarly, it is gratifying to see the work we do impacts large numbers of people, even if people don’t know it. You see the numbers decrease. When we do our jobs right, it’s invisible.”
