ST. CLAIRSVILLE — New leadership is on the way to the Belmont County Health Department.

The board of health held a special meeting Tuesday night to review some additional resources that will allow expansion of services and personnel.

“We’re hiring a director of nursing/nurse practitioner,” Deputy Health Commissioner Robert Sproul said. “The Workforce Development grant that we were able to get is allowing us to expand our workforce, with the intent that we’re going to be able to offer more services in the near future.”

Sproul said the two-year grant is for $230,000.

He said bringing a nurse practitioner into the office will open up many additional options.

He also said the board already has decided on a candidate for the new position and likely will release the name of the new hire soon.

“We have to offer it to her and see if she’ll accept it before we’ll release her name,” Sproul said.

We had a sub-group of board members meet and do the interviews with the individuals, because these are management-level people in our office.”

He said the department considered 15 candidates. All the candidates were external to the health department.

“They’re going to be director of nursing, so they’ll be over all the nursing staff and nursing programs at our office. They’ll also be a nurse practitioner. With that, we’ll be hoping to expand programs within our office. There’s a lot of grants that the state has that we cannot apply for without a nurse practitioner on staff, so once we have that individual in, we’ll be able to apply for additional grants.

“Also with the way the billing goes, if you have a nurse practitioner in the office you can bill at a higher rate,” he continued. “So basically that will bring additional funding to the health department. It doesn’t cost the public any more, the insurance company just pays at a higher rate.”

Sproul said new services could include expanding the half-day family planning clinics to full days. Other programs could also be launched to address public problems such as obesity and diabetes.

“There’s a lot of things going on in the community that we’d like to reach out to,” he said.

Sproul said the position’s pay would be in the range of $45 an hour.

Sproul said the grant might also allow the health department to expand its environmental services.

“We right now have four sanitarians. We’d like to expand that to five, because both Monroe and Harrison counties have three sanitarians with a much smaller population than we do,” Sproul said. “We’re supposed to go out and inspect (sewer and septic) systems after they’ve been installed for so many years to make sure they’re still working properly. We haven’t had the staff to go do that, to make sure we’re not polluting the waters of the state.”

In addition, the board has two COVID-19 related grants that will expire in December or January with about $60,000 remaining to be spent.

“They have to approve some of the things that we’re looking at, in addition to our budget for next year,” Sproul said of the board. “The problem is the restrictions (on how the money can be used).”

The board is considering buying more laptops for use in the field and possibly a clinic trailer with cold storage and seating.

“So we can go out in the community and do shots. Even after COVID’s over, we can go out and do immunizations in smaller communities, flu shots in smaller communities, try to get out into the underserved areas,” Sproul said regarding the trailer.

“Our general budget for next year, we’ve got to take that to the commissioners for final approval and we’ll have our budget for next year. We’re staying within our funds,” he said.

The proposed budget amount was not immediately available but is expected to be comparable to prior years.

“It’s staying pretty good. With the additional COVID money, we’re still doing COVID (vaccine) clinics … so the county health is not being hit as hard. … We’re hoping with the nurse practitioner coming in, we can do additional things with the nursing budget.”

Sproul said raises for health department employees will also be discussed at a future work session.

“We have people doing multiple positions. We need to change it up a little bit,” Sproul said.

The board approved the nurse practitioner candidate and set an additional work session for 6 p.m. Nov. 30 at the Belmont County Emergency Management Agency office to review job descriptions and salary ranges.