An upcoming community town hall in Minden will give County residents the chance to help shape the future of Lakelands Public Health (LPH) programs and priorities, says local medical officer of health Dr. Thomas Piggott.
The health unit kicks off a four-part series at the Minden Community Centre April 14 at 4 p.m. There will be other sessions in Port Hope, Lindsay and Peterborough through the end of May.
Each town hall will offer an overview of LPH services followed by interactive discussions with staff and opportunities for attendees to provide one-on-one feedback to program and department heads. The input gathered will be used to form the health unit’s new strategic plan, Piggott said.
“It’s only once in a generation that you get the chance to create a new health unit, so we want to take the time to engage and bring the community along as much as possible,” Piggott said. “We want to listen to what people think about public health – the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between.”
Piggott said the session will provide his staff an opportunity to explain all that public health is responsible for – and learn about existing service gaps the community want to see plugged.
The agency primarily deals with chronic disease prevention, infectious disease control, environmental and family health and emergency preparedness. Public health takes the lead on immunization, testing, treatment and counselling for sexual health and substance abuse and operating programs like Healthy Babies, Healthy Children (HBHC) and Healthy Smiles Ontario.
“I think public health is an ongoing twoway dialogue. It’s not just something we do and dictate to our community; it has to include conversations and really be something we grow and build together,” Piggott said.
Since the merger between Peterborough Public Health and Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge district health unit in January 2025, Piggott said LPH has made many program enhancements – including one that was made possible because of the union.
“We’ve introduced the nurse family partnership program (NFP), which is something that focuses on assisting vulnerable women 24 and younger who are first-time moms. It includes home visits and is something we couldn’t do before the merger because both health units had too small a population to partake,” Piggott said, noting it’s a collaboration with McMaster University.
He said the health unit has also invested around $500,000 to bolster its infection prevention control hub.
“We’ve started harmonizing a lot of our disease reporting dashboards – both health units had slightly different ways of communicating infectious diseases and rates of injury and chronic disease, so that’s all on our website now, where people can search by region,” Piggott added.
While the union wasn’t just about improving efficiency and removing redundancies, Piggott said LPH has managed to save around $300,000 in occupancy and insurance costs bringing PPH and HKPR together under one banner.
Piggott said the the health unit will unveil a new strategic plan in 2027.
“It’s going to take the next year or so to really complete… through this journey, there may be some changes, but we’re looking to do them more opportunistically. If we have people departing, we’re looking to make sure there’s work we want to continue to do but also looking to do things we’ve never done before and that’s exciting,” he said.
Piggott said he’ll be in Minden next week and hopes to see a full house at the community centre.
“Taking steps to improve public health services is critically important, especially now given the state of the world and the challenges people are facing. We hope people come out and vocalize their thoughts. We’re open to having honest conversations, even around challenges as that’s the only way to reflect and improve,” Piggott said.
Anyone who can’t attend can participate by filling out a survey available online at www.lakelandsph.ca/news-and-alerts/posts/ community-survey.
