These groups in Westmoreland County are pushing to get their own health department

GREENSBURG, Pa. — One of the keys in the race to vaccinate Americans has been coordination between state and local health experts, like the people at the Allegheny County Health Department.

But health departments like that are the exception in Pennsylvania, where just six counties have their own.

Westmoreland County is the second-largest and second-most populated county in western Pennsylvania — but there isn’t a county health department there.

Health guidance comes from the state, but some local grassroots organizations would like to see that change.

“We’ve actually been thinking about this for almost a year now when COVID first hit,” said Diana Steck, who like so many others, is fighting to get vaccinated. It’s a process she feels would be better administrated by a county-run health department.

“It’s very inequitable. It’s a very cumbersome process, and I do believe if we had a health department, there would’ve been more coordination and made things easier for everyone,” said Steck, who is heavily involved with Voice of Westmoreland, a local community group.

She and other community-based organizations are pushing for the county to create its own centralized health department.

“To just sit back and say, ‘Well, we don’t have a health department and we’re going to wait on the state’ is really not serving the public,” she said.

There are only two counties in Western Pennsylvania with their own health department, the largest being Allegheny County with a population of over 1 million, which has vaccinated just about 5% of its population.

A much smaller county, Erie, also has its own county health department and partially vaccinated over 10,000 of its 269,000 residents.

And despite Westmoreland having a larger population than Erie by almost 100,000 — health guidance comes from the state. Still, more than 18,000 people have received at least their first dose of the vaccine there.

Given Westmoreland’s landscape, Steck feels efforts to vaccinate would be better coordinated on a county level.

“We have so many rural areas, we have so many different little neighborhoods, so we don’t have large urban areas. Greensburg did the largest city; that of itself is a bit of a barrier.”

Meanwhile, Washington County leaders also recently considered the idea of creating their own county health department, but said Friday they’ve decided to wait on that plan, wanting to focus on vaccinating their residents.

Channel 11 reached out to Westmoreland County commissioners about this idea of a county-run health department, and they said it would have to be discussed as a board. The cost and organization would be extensive, and the process would take years to develop.

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