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| “People would rather believe than know.” ― Edward O. Wilson |
Hello again! This is another late post and I apologize for the delay. Sadly, that delay is now a year old and before another year ends, I decided to share this with you all as the ultimate "throwback".
On the 7th of November 2016, my colleagues and I as part of our Community Health Clerkship visited the Environmental Health Department and its facilities and received several presentations from the various departments on the functions of each and the role of the department as it relates to the population.
As the goals of medicine and of public health services are to promote, preserve and to restore to good health, it is important for exposure to the components of environmental health its functions.
The first presenter for the day was Mr. Allen, who gave a general overview of the department and their responsibilities which consists of various units that make their job easier to manage and execute. The units mentioned were the:
a) Licensing Unit: which involves the licensing of any business and also the renewal of these licenses;
b) Building Control Unit: where applications are processed for any building in the country;
c) Port Health Unit: which is responsible for the importation of food products to ensure there is proper documentation of such (inclusive of location from where the product comes, history such as if the country is on a banned list) and to ensure the International Health Regulations must be met by any vessel coming into the Ports as a means of preventing entry of communicable disease;
d) Complaints Unit: deals with any complaints the public may have;
e) Sanitation Unit: that deals with issues in the neighbourhoods and communities and the business world;
f) Vector-Control Unit: whose primary concern are mosquito and vector-borne diseases.
The Environmental Health Department is able to function because of the Environmental Health Act and the Subsidiary Legislation.
Whenever there is an environmental violation, by law the department is allowed to firstly converse with the person(s) involved in the violation to see if via conversation the changes that are needed can be made. If this is not successful, they are able to write a report on the situation outlining the specifics and the measures taken and then able to create a legal document called a Public Health Order which is a notice that informs the individual(s) that they are breaking the law, what is needed for the matter to be rectified and the time-frame in which said matter should be resolved before legal action is taken. Attached to the document are penalty fees. These penalty fees are applied once the document expires and they begin at $30 for the first day of expiration and decrease to $15 for each day thereafter. As the legal system here is so taxed, persons can accrue quite a fine before ever having their matter heard in court.
During this rotation, I mostly appreciated the opportunity we got to be exposed to various aspects of health since it allows me (the soon to be Physician) to have a clearer understanding of the environmental components that can affect the health of a population and how we each have a role to play in maintaining a certain level of health of our society simply by keeping our surroundings clean.
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