Georgia public health officials tell lawmakers prevention, lab and home‑visiting programs are central to keeping communities well

Dr. Becky Toomey, a long‑time public health leader with the Georgia Department of Public Health, told a Georgia House study committee that public health’s chief mission is to prevent disease, protect communities and promote health at the population level.

Toomey, a longtime state epidemiologist and public‑health clinician, outlined routine and emergency public‑health work, from newborn screening to outbreak investigations, and described how those functions operate differently than clinical care. “What public health focuses on is prevention, protecting and improving health of communities,” she said, adding that population‑level interventions “will clearly improve the health of all the individuals in the community.”

Public health’s value, witnesses told the committee, is often invisible until a local outbreak or a system stressor occurs. Toomey described two investigations that led to policy changes beyond the immediate outbreak: a norovirus cluster tied to decorated cakes that reinforced glove requirements in food service, and a 2006 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to a Cobb County water park that prompted changes in pool design and chlorine‑monitoring rules after several children were infected. “It was such an — to me, it was so interesting,” she said of the cake investigation, and of the water‑park case she recalled roughly 26 infections, seven hospitalizations and one child death.

She also emphasized infrastructure that rarely reaches headlines: the state public‑health laboratory, newborn screening and the epidemiology unit. Toomey said Georgia’s lab performs tests “that no other laboratory, no commercial lab is going to do,” including newborn screening (screening more than 126 disorders for newborns) and testing used in outbreak response, and that the state’s epidemiology capacity is one of the department’s strongest assets.

Program examples: home visiting and contraception access

Toomey highlighted the department’s home‑visiting program for pregnant and postpartum women as a model of prevention that helps identify risk early and connect families to care. She said a short pilot rapidly showed measurable improvements in maternal and infant outcomes and helped identify life‑threatening conditions for newborns during routine postpartum checks. That program, combined with perinatal telehealth expansions lawmakers recently funded, is intended to reduce access gaps in counties that have lost labor‑and‑delivery services.

Toomey and district leaders also described how DPH reduced barriers to long‑acting reversible contraception (LARC) by allowing nurses to insert devices under protocol and through industry partnerships and targeted funding. The department used a mix of private support and legislative backing to expand Nexplanon insertion in counties that previously had limited access to clinic‑based advanced practice clinicians.

Structure, history and federal ties

Testifying to the committee, Toomey traced public health’s work in Georgia from early federal sanitary efforts and malaria control through the evolution of county health departments. She noted the state’s hybrid structure — county boards of health alongside state oversight — creates both local responsiveness and uneven capacity across 159 counties. “If you’ve seen one health department, you’ve seen one health department,” she said, describing wide variation in services by county.

Federal funding and shifting federal priorities were a recurrent theme. Toomey said many core programs have substantial federal funding but warned about the uncertainty created by recent federal grant changes. She urged lawmakers to consider the state’s role in sustaining core services as federal resources shift.

What public health does daily

Witnesses described a wide set of routine tasks health departments perform at the county level: immunizations for children and adults, provision of vital records (birth and death certificates), maternal and child services including WIC, family planning, tuberculosis and STD diagnosis and treatment, environmental health inspections (restaurants, pools, septic systems), newborn screening and, in some counties, dental and mosquito control services. Toomey said transportation is a frequent barrier to care in many communities and that outreach — mobile clinics, home visits and telehealth — can help close gaps.

Where lawmakers asked for clarity, Toomey and district directors described limits of local authority and how services differ by county size. For example, some rural counties rely on a single environmental health specialist; larger counties may field teams that inspect dozens of facilities. She urged the committee to consider regional solutions for specialized services where local staffing and volume make full local coverage difficult.

Quotations and sources

Direct quotations in this article come from Dr. Becky Toomey during her committee presentation. Examples and program details were provided by Toomey and were repeated by district directors during the session.

Ending

Committee members said they will use the session as an early step in a broader study of Georgia’s public health funding and structure. Witnesses asked lawmakers to prioritize investments in laboratory capacity, epidemiology and community‑level prevention programs — services, they said, that keep people out of hospitals and reduce longer‑term health costs.