The Putnam County Health Department celebrated its $1.8 million expansion with a ribbon cutting ceremony Thursday.
Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter said the wing will provide isolated testing and treatment for patients with contagious diseases. It will also provide new space for children to receive shots and vaccinations.
“Our health department and our health department employees do such a great job and they were our heroes during the covid, the pandemic, the tornado all those things and we are so proud of them,” Porter said. “The facility needed expanding because our county is growing and we will make sure we take care of our community and to see this come to fruition it’s just a great day to be in Putnam County.”
The department served a total of 43,500 patients last year. The expansion also includes clinic rooms, isolation rooms, a command center, medical storage, a drive-through canopy, drug expansion, expansion of the parking lot, and medical and waiting room furniture.
Tennessee Commissioner of Health Ralph Alvarado said the state is ranked forty fourth in public health outcomes.
“That’s bottom ten and so I appeal to the pride of everybody here, the pride of this state that we are proud of how we are to start focusing on seeing things how we can improve our own health outcomes,” Alvarado said. “That’s going to take a community-wide effort, a lot of that effort occurs in this building.”
Porter said he is thankful for the state working with the county and attributes great teamwork and putting funds together to creating a great thing. Porter said that the pandemic exposed a lot of flaws in the former structure.
“One of the things that we realized we needed was a new facility that if we had that happen again that they can put those people off in a separate place to be able to deal with those contagious diseases so they are not part of the whole facility,” Porter said. “A drive-through facility that we can use here to do vaccinations and stuff, we set up at the old fairgrounds Hyder-Burks and they did a great job but we knew we needed to do more here.”
Putnam County Health Department Director Lisa Bumbalough said she and the department appreciate the resources the new wing will provide.
“We are so grateful for the contractors that are here,” Bumbalough said. “They did a fantastic job in constructing our facility.”
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