{"id":70542,"date":"2017-04-05T14:16:14","date_gmt":"2017-04-05T20:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/open-house-showcases-montezuma-county-health-department\/"},"modified":"2017-04-05T20:16:14","modified_gmt":"2017-04-05T20:16:14","slug":"open-house-showcases-montezuma-county-health-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/open-house-showcases-montezuma-county-health-department\/","title":{"rendered":"Open house showcases Montezuma County health department"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Courtney
Courtney Sikes and her two children, Marin and Maddie Quay Sikes, enjoy the toys and books at the Montezuma County Health Department open house Tuesday.<\/span>Sam Green\/The Journal<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The Montezuma County Public Health Department was crowded Tuesday afternoon with people looking to learn more about the services offered there.<\/p>\n

All the department staff worked together to put on an open house designed to show the community what they do, setting up booths and displays for each program. As an extra incentive, guests who stopped at every booth could enter a raffle to win a gift basket.<\/p>\n

Health department staff said the number of people who came exceeded expectations, though only time will tell if the open house will lead to more enrollment in health programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so impressed,\u201d Bobbi Lock, the department director, said of the crowd. \u201cWe weren\u2019t sure how many people we\u2019d get, but this is great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the programs on display at the event were relatively new, like the Baby and Me Tobacco Free program, which offers incentives for pregnant women to quit smoking, and has only been available in Montezuma County since 2014. Others have been around for years, like the Women, Infants and Children nutrition assistance program, which currently serves more than 680 people countywide.<\/p>\n

Donna Pettingill, who has been part of WIC for more than 20 years, said it\u2019s different from many of the other food assistance programs available in the county.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a welfare program \u2013 in fact it actually saves the country a lot of money,\u201d she said. \u201cFamilies (who use WIC) are generally healthier, because we help educate them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Car seat technicians, long-term care physicians, behavioral health counselors and more handed out information on their services.<\/p>\n

Some of the lesser-known parts of the department were also in attendance, like environmental health specialist Melissa Mathews, whose booth promoted her efforts to monitor disease spread by wildlife, as well as help people properly dispose of waste tires, which she said is an often-overlooked service.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m really struggling with that, because people still load them up in the back of the vehicle and take them home and let them accumulate,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Almost all the health department\u2019s programs are funded by the federal or state government, so many of them are free, like blood pressure and cardiovascular screenings.<\/p>\n

Lock said each member of the department contributed something to the open house, whether it was creating interactive displays for their booths or baking the homemade refreshments in the lobby. She hopes to make it an annual event from now on.<\/p>\n

\n

Find out more<\/h4>\n

To learn more about the Montezuma County Public Health Department, go to montezumacounty.org and click on the \u201cPublic Health\u201d tab under \u201cDepartments and Contacts,\u201d or call 970-565-3056. The office is at 106 W. North St., Cortez.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

participants will sign up for programs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70543,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,13,237,668],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-70542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-montezuma-county-government","tag-public-health"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70542"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=70542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}