OAKLAND — The Garrett County Health Department recently became one of seven county health departments in Maryland to receive national accreditation from the Public Health Accreditation Board.

“I’d have to say, honestly, Garrett County is not a good health department — Garrett County is a great health department,” Howard Haft, deputy secretary of public health at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said during an accreditation celebration Wednesday. “Incredible leadership, incredible staff that are very dedicated with many, many years of dedicated service.”

The health department received accreditation in November and all the work was done by staff, who worked in each domain, according to Rodney Glotfelty, the health department’s health officer.

“Accreditation is a big deal — only 12 percent of local health departments in the United States have been accredited so far,” Glotfelty said. “Of that 12 percent, only 7 percent serve populations under 50,000.”

Once documentation was submitted to the accreditation board, a site review team visited the health department to discuss the various domains, said Glotfelty.

“When you step back and look at how many health departments in the nation reached this level and most of them being much bigger, the standards don’t change regardless of the size,” said Paul Edwards, chairman of the Garrett County Board of Commissioners. “For us to reach that with the size and scope of the staff here, when others that are much bigger have yet to do that, I think it speaks volumes of the commitment of the staff and Rodney’s leadership.”

The health department earned accreditation after a two-year, multi-faceted peer review assessment process to ensure it meets or exceeds a set of quality standards and measures for public health.

“It’s not just the documentation. It’s really the fact that people put their heart and soul into it and they change how they do things to make them just the absolute best practices in the nation,” Haft said. “You are really the unsung heroes in health care.”

The national accreditation program works to improve and protect the health of the public by advancing the quality and performance of the nation’s health departments. The program, which is jointly supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, sets standards against which the nation’s more than 3,000 governmental public health departments can continuously improve the quality of their services and performance.

“I just wish that everybody in the state legislature, federal legislature, everybody in the community really understood how important the work you do every day is — I understand it,” Haft said.

“If you think about it, you have hit the apex of your industry and that’s something worth celebrating,” said Edwards.

 

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