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Norwalk Health Department reports strong year in performance dashboards, flags data and staffing needs
Summary
At its Oct. 28 meeting the Norwalk City Board of Health heard an annual performance management review showing multiple divisions met or exceeded targets. The department reported high immunization and follow-up rates, expanded epidemiology outputs and planned measure updates while flagging workforce and funding gaps.
Aniela Fagnon, the project coordinator for the Norwalk Health Department, told the Board of Health on Oct. 28 that the department uses a formal performance management system "in place to monitor the quality of performance of public health processes, programs, interventions, and other activities, improve public health practice, and ultimately improve the health of Norwalk residents." Fagnon presented division dashboards, color-coded targets and an annual analysis process used to set goals, report quarterly and summarize results.
Fagnon said dashboards assign measures to domains and supervisors report on each measure quarterly, adding performance narratives that explain why targets were met or missed. She described the status key used across dashboards: dark green for 95% of a target or greater, light green for 85—5%, yellow for 70—5% and red for 70% or less; gray denotes insufficient data. "This is all about developing those objectives and measures, carrying out the processes that we need to gather the data, looking at that data, analyzing whether there are any opportunities for improvement, implementing those as needed, and then reiterating the entire process to continue to continuously improve our department," she said.
Division highlights presented to the board included community health reporting more than 150 outreach events and improved screening follow-up rates after adding a bilingual community health worker; epidemiology and informatics reporting "100% of infectious disease follow ups were completed" for conditions such as enteric infections, COVID-19 and HCV and noting 35-plus presentations to committees and community groups; and preventable diseases and clinical services reporting 100% appropriate treatment for major reportable STIs and 100% participation in directly observed therapy (DOT) for active tuberculosis when treatment was ordered.
Fagnon cited vaccination metrics: the Norwalk catchment area ranked first in Connecticut at 94% for the 2022 cohort (1,641 of 1,742 children up-to-date by age two) and the Danbury catchment area ranked second at 88.2% (1,418 of 1,608 children). The WIC team ran 18 outreach events and is fully staffed, she said.
Board members pressed for additional numerical detail on tuberculosis. Ken Laleem asked, "How many patients did we manage that had TB?" Department staff said active TB cases are "about 1 to 2 patients per year" while latent TB visits are more numerous and staff committed to follow up with the clinical services supervisor (Darlene Hoffler) to provide a precise count.
Fagnon summarized next steps: divisions will refine dashboard definitions and measures for fiscal year 2025—26, prioritize measures tied to grants or mandated plans (for example CHIP, QI plan, workforce development), and propose new measures such as the percentage of children in the Growing Gardens program reporting increased fruit and vegetable consumption and percent of WIC clients enrolling in the first trimester.
The department asked the board to note that revising measures is intended to reduce retroactive data collection, align measures with staff capacity and emphasize grant-mandated deliverables. Deanna (the director of health) will review final draft dashboards before deployment.
