From the Executive Director

Strengthening Our Community

Strengthening Community Ties is our theme for this 53rd Annual Report. Strengthening Community Ties represents an ongoing strategy to target and multiply our effectiveness in serving the public health needs of our entire community of some 870,000 people. The theme of our 1996 Annual Report was “Working With and For…DuPage Residents” and highlighted numerous linkages with external organizations. Our 1997 Annual Report, “Shaping Public Health for the 21st Century,” similarly underscored our interrelationships with our external environment and our community ties through our community assessments, outreach and collaborative activities.

The core public health functions of assessment, policy development and assurance include not only the intramural services we provide through our clinics and our external regulatory operations. As a public health agency, the scope of our field of vision must include all of the conditions and institutions in our environment that impact the health of all of our publics. Thus, we must constantly seek to build and strengthen community ties with the people and institutions that help shape that environment.

This report highlights but a few of the scores of activities in which our 700 full time and part time staff members were engaged in 1998. We continue to refine our organizational vision and structure as we build stronger and larger internal and external networks. While we carry out our responsibilities with but one percent of the county’s total health dollars, we seek through strengthening our community ties to significantly influence how the other ninety-nine percent of health care expenditures ultimately lead to a healthier society.

This Annual Report will be our first to be placed on our new, greatly expanded web site at www.dupagehealth.org. We hope that this report and all of the other information on our web site will help to strengthen community ties by making available electronically to the entire community a wealth of information about the health of DuPage County. The web site also will provide linkages to the ever-expanding world of health knowledge available on the Internet.

We thank all of those in the community with whom we have been privileged to work in 1998. We thank our Board of Health officers and members for their dedication and leadership in shaping a framework for a healthier DuPage County. We always welcome comments on any of the activities of our department – and on those things we may not be doing.

David R. McNutt, M.D., M.P.H.
February 15, 1999

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