Greene County Public Health Department Collection

Collection — Box: LOB 102

Identifier: MSS 2019.0015

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Collection comprises two scrapbooks and a selection of loose papers related to the Public Health Department in Greene County and the role and functions of the Home Healthcare Nurses employed by that department from its inception through the late 1990s. The Scrapbooks contain clippings selected from a variety of local Newsapers including the Examiner-Recorder, Coxsackie Union-News, Windham Journal, and Athens Herald among others, and all clippings relate to local health education, healthcare, and vaccination/treatment prorgrams occuring at the local level from the 1940s through the 1980s.

Dates

Majority of material found in 1938-2014

Biographical / Historical

The first Public Health Nursing program in Greene County was formed out of an initiative by the Greene County Tuberculosis Committee working on behalf of the Greene County Board of Supervisors in 1938. The function of these Nurses from 1938 to the time the program ended in the early 2000s remained essentially unchanged, with these nurses overseeing home care programs for outpatient treatments, physical therapy, palliative care, maternity and infant health visits, and a variety of other tasks. The Home Healthcare/Public Health Nurses participated in and gave educational instruction on Health and wellness best practices for those who otherwise had no access to such information, and oversaw the implementation of inocculation programs against preventable diseases. The program was discontinued by the Greene County Public Health Department before 2010, and the responsibilities and work of Public Health Nurses has been nominally replaced by a variety of different private organizations with varyin degrees of success.