Local health officials have a variety of challenges and developments on their minds as Northeast Georgia looks back at 2022 and heads into 2023.
Dr. Zachary Taylor, director of Northeast Georgia’s District 2 Public Health, said 2022 was a busy year in the region, starting off with the surge in COVID-19 cases brought on by the Omicron variant early in the year.
“We were still vaccinating a lot of people for COVID,” Dr. Taylor said. “At the same time, we were transitioning back to our regular work, what we typically do as public health in our public health departments. I would describe it as a transition period.”
Dr. Taylor said overall, COVID numbers were lower in 2022 than in years prior. However, he said the increase in the availability of at-home tests, which are not reported to the health department, could have had an impact on the overall numbers.
“We’re probably undercounting the current number of COVID cases that we do have,” Dr. Taylor said.
But COVID has become more treatable in 2022 with the availability of new treatments like Paxlovid, an antiviral medication.
The outlook for influenza cases heading into 2023 is not as promising, according to Dr. Taylor.
“We didn’t have as high rates of infection and hospitalizations associated with influenza last year,” Dr. Talor said. “Now, this year, it’s been a different story. We started out very early in the influenza season. We’re starting to see increases in our older population, which is concerning to us.”
Finally, Dr. Taylor said RSV spread was higher toward the end of 2022 and will continue to be a concern heading into 2023.
One thing District 2 will be focusing on in 2023 is a rise in sexually transmitted infections in the region.
“Our rates of sexually transmitted infections are lower than the metropolitan Atlanta area and lower than they are in South Georgia,” Dr. Taylor said. “However, the increases are concerning. We’ve seen increases in syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. We really want to pay attention to that and control it as best we can. We do a lot of detection, we obviously treat.”
From a healthcare standpoint, Northeast Georgia Health System has had an exciting 2022.
Carol Burrell, president, and CEO of NGHS, said they had a lot to celebrate throughout the year.
“Our Georgia Heart Institute celebrated its first year after launching a year ago,” Burell said. “We’re just really excited to see the continued expansion of expertise with cardiac care in this region. We started our Neurointerventional focus on stroke a couple of years ago, and this past year we received the highest stroke certification at our Gainesville campus, which just acknowledges the complexity of the stroke care that we’re providing.”
However, Burrell said they have certainly had their share of challenges in 2022. One of the largest challenges NGHS will continue to account for in the new year relates to workforce retention and recruitment.
“We are working diligently with some of our own internal programs to train patient care techs, as well as advancing clinical staff to gain their LPN degrees and ultimately RN degrees,” Burrell said. “We’re working with the University of North Georgia as well as Lanier Tech to really help folks who maybe have a degree, but not in healthcare, and how they can go on an accelerated track to do that.”
Burrell said they also plan to continue focusing on telehealth in the new year.
“We certainly learned through the pandemic that patients don’t necessarily have to be in an office to be treated,” Burrell said. “We will continue to advance the telehealth visits, which will make it more accessible.”
Additionally, NGHS has several construction projects in the works, including expansions on the campuses of Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville and Northeast Georgia Medical Center Braselton.
NGHS also opened a new medical plaza in Buford in 2022 and broke ground on new facilities in Lumpkin and Barrow counties.
Finally, Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville recently applied for Level 1 Trauma certification. The health system expects to receive results for its application sometime in Spring 2023.
