Assessing Local Public Health Governance in North Carolina Across Organizational and Governance Configurations.

Background: Every county in North Carolina must include a board of health (BOH) with specific prescribed duties and powers. It is unclear how BOHs in North Carolina are currently exercising their governance ability. In 2012, the North Carolina General Assembly provided coun-ties with additional flexibility to select among different configurations for their local health department (LHD).

Local Public Health Strategies for Addressing Social Determinants of Health-Analysis of Recent Community Health Improvement Plans.

Context: The Public Health 3.0 (PH3.0) framework encourages local health departments (LHDs) to address the social determinants of health (SDOHs) that impact health equity.

Investigating the Role of Local Board of Health Governance on Local Health Department Policymaking Behavior.

Objectives: This study sought to identify groupings of policymaking behavior among local governmental health departments (LHDs) across the country and assess whether such groupings were associated with the governance activity of their board of health (BOH).

Design: We conducted latent class analysis (LCA) to identify possible classes of policymaking behavior among LHDs. Once classes were identified, we used multinomial logistic regression (MLN) to estimate the association between an LHD's policymaking behavior and the governance activity of their BOH.

Local Health Department Values and Organizational Authorities Guiding Cross-Sector Work During COVID-19.

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the role that local health departments (LHDs) have in cross sector can address alone, including the work of value alignment and the strategic use of organizational authorities. The practices by which LHDs used their authorities to conduct cross-sector work during the pandemic need exploration.

Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 public health leaders from metropolitan LHDs across the United States.

First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States.

An outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that began in Wuhan, China, has spread rapidly, with cases now confirmed in multiple countries. We report the first case of 2019-nCoV infection confirmed in the United States and describe the identification, diagnosis, clinical course, and management of the case, including the patient's initial mild symptoms at presentation with progression to pneumonia on day 9 of illness. This case highlights the importance of close coordination between clinicians and public health authorities at the local, state, and federal levels, as well as the need for rapid dissemination of clinical information related to the care of patients with this emerging infection.

Succession Planning and Management Practice in Washington State Local Public Health Agencies.

Context: Turnover of top local public health officials is expected to be great, with 23% being 60 years of age or older, and another 42% being 50 to 59 years of age. Yet, we know little about the use of succession planning in public health agencies.

Objective: Describe succession planning practices in local public health agencies.

Lessons learned from a policy decision to coordinate a multijurisdiction H1N1 response with a single incident management team.

This case review describes the creation of a single incident management team by 5 independent local public health agencies to respond to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. It focuses at the policy level, describing relationship building between local public health agency leaders and the conditions required to support such a response. Readers will understand the precursors that allowed for this regionalized response, how the response was implemented, the lessons learned, and recommendations for future responses.

Rethinking volunteer management using a centralized volunteer staging and training area.

Public health agencies simply do not have enough trained staff or volunteers to effectively respond to a large-scale disaster. Training volunteers "off the street" will be crucial--but time consuming--in a public health emergency. A centralized volunteer staging and training area can help to efficiently register, credential, and conduct just-in-time training of volunteers, while reducing stress, confusion, traffic congestion, and security issues at various mass dispensing clinics.