The McHenry County Health Department, looking for ways to trim $325,000 from its 1998 budget, is considering whether slashing service and staff might be necessary to meet the strict cuts mandated for next year’s budget.
It’s a grim state of affairs, since one of the cost-saving options is to trim the numbers of children who are immunized from deadly diseases. But a new network of private low-cost clinics is expected to take up some of the slack.
“We’re doing our best to assure that children’s vaccines are available,” said Barb Yurgaitis, the health department’s administrative manager.
The Health Department has clinics throughout the county where parents can take their children for immunizations. But if the service cuts are approved by the County Board, those clinics would vaccinate 6,000 fewer youngsters than a year ago.
The County Board recently asked each county department to reduce general fund spending 15.9 percent when the new budget cycle begins Dec. 1. County finance director Kathy Reinertsen said the cuts are needed to end nearly a decade of spending more money than the county has received.
Early projections in the Health Department call for eliminating up to eight full-time and six part-time positions, according to public health administrator Mike Bacon.
He said he hopes to accomplish that through attrition instead of layoffs. But he said that, either way, residents are likely to see service slowdowns and cutbacks, including less after-hours service from the animal control staff and fewer visits by home health-care nurses.
The childhood immunization program would take a hard hit, going from delivering about 18,000 vaccinations to 12,000 next year.
This is where Together We Can and its Immunization Partnership Clinics program comes in, health department officials said. This network of health-care providers should make it easier for vaccinations to be delivered, while keeping costs down.
The program has 10 locations in Algonquin, Crystal Lake, Harvard, Lake in the Hills, Marengo, McHenry, Richmond and Woodstock. Parents can take children there for vaccinations against diseases including polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, influenza type B and hepatitis B.
The first clinic opened last April. Even though there has been almost no marketing beyond distributing fliers to doctors’ offices, schools and libraries, each location is vaccinating at least 30 children a month, according to Neelam Bhardwaj, director of corporate planning for Centegra Health System, which runs Northern Illinois Medical Center in McHenry and Memorial Medical Center in Woodstock.
The cost at those clinics is $8 per vaccination, though no one is turned away for financial reasons.
Bhardwaj said the idea for the program resulted from a Together We Can survey of 6,000 county households revealing that nearly one-third of youngsters age 2 and younger lacked proper immunizations.
“That result astonished us,” Bhardwaj said. “This is a relatively affluent county. No one expected that many children to be lacking proper immunizations.”
