BUCKHANNON – The new medical director for the Upshur-Buckhannon Health Department plans to introduce herself to the community through short educational videos about common and prevalent health issues.
Dr. Catherine (Mindy) Chua, medical director for the Upshur-Buckhannon Health Department, started her new position on March 1 while continuing to practice in Elkins at Vandalia Davis, where she practices family and integrative medicine.
“I have a master’s degree in population health, which is very similar to public health, except it comes from the level of the hospital, as opposed to the level of the community, but a lot of the ideas are the same, to keep the public healthy in order to keep them out of the hospital,” Chua said. “The health department does a lot of things with vaccines and clean water, that sort of thing, so if you can keep communities healthy, that keeps each individual member of the community healthier.”
Her role as medical director includes education, community engagement and ordering medical supplies, such as vaccines.
“I help the department keep their policies up-to-date and in line with the most recent medical literature, and then when they do vaccines, they have to have a physician who orders those, so I’m the ordering physician for that kind of stuff,” Chua said. “I’m also a resource to them. If someone were to walk in off the street and they weren’t quite sure how to treat them, I’m on call for those kinds of questions. Then there’s some community stuff, too. I will go around to different physicians’ offices and find out what they feel the community needs.”
Chua said she is still integrating into the new role, but she wants to put together short educational videos about different health concerns.
“I think short term, what I really want to do is start doing some short videos to put on the Facebook page that are educational, and I also want to really start opening up good communication between the health department and the community physicians, so the physicians feel they really, truly have a resource,” Chua said. “What I’d like to do is combine those two things and have some of the local community physicians help me do some of those educational videos based on what they see our public health issues are in Upshur County.”
She hopes engaging with these videos will encourage the community to also interact with other services from the health department.
“For the summertime, I may do videos on tick awareness, why sunscreen is important, healthy vegetables that you could grow in your garden easily — just things like that,” Chua said. “I think we can do a lot of quick public education, keeping people engaged, and the more you keep people engaged with places like the health department, the more they’re going to be exposed to some of the other things that the health department’s putting out there as well.”
Chua said she hopes to build on the work already done by the health department and Dr. Joseph Reed.
“I think it’s important to say that I think the health department has been absolutely amazing, and me being a part of it now, I don’t want to make huge changes, because they haven’t done anything wrong,” Chua said. “I just hope that I can enhance the services they’re already offering and build on what Dr. Reed built before me.”
