Summit County Healthcast Summit County Health Department

After vaping for eight months, twenty-year-old Katie Bertram became heavily addicted. Soon, she began to experience chest pains and difficulty breathing. Katie joins us on the Healthcast to discuss her vaping journey: the reason she started, how her addiction grew out of control, the health scares that made her want to quit, and how she was able to walk away from vaping with family support.

Listen as Katie shares personal insights for peers in the same situation and valuable advice to parents who discover their children are vaping and want to help them quit.

This episode is the second half of our conversation with Health Director Rich Bullough and Deputy Director Phil Bondurant. We look forward to the health department’s 2020 initiatives and areas of focus for the year, including:



* Sustainability

* Electronic WIC card pilot program

* Integrating Behavioral Health services into Early Intervention

* Diabetes Prevention Program Expansion

* A “Health in All Policies” approach

In this episode of the healthcast, Director Rich Bullough and Deputy Director Phil Bondurant outline the department’s major successes over the course of 2019 and how they impacted the community. Bullough and Bondurant cited support from County Council, the Board of Health, County Manager Tom Fisher, various community partners and innovative staff as the main drivers behind these initiatives.

“This department is innovative,” Bullough said. “We’re not just following and responding to emergencies. We really feel like we’ve shifted from the perspective of regulation to really begin looking at [Summit County’s] future. I think that we’re an important player in that.”

Major 2019 projects and initiatives mentioned by health department leadership included:



* Behavioral Health

* Wastewater Ordinance, particularly on the East Side

* The Community Health Assessment Survey

* Streamlining of the Sundance permitting process

* The Summit County Farmer’s Market

* Family Planning Elevated Grant

Flu season is upon us once more and we sat down with Nursing Director Carolyn Rose to talk about everything you need to know to be prepared. In this episode, we answer common questions such as who needs a flu shot, who a flu shot protects (hint: it isn’t just you), how flu vaccines are created, other ways to prevent the flu and more.

We also debunk the myth that you can become ill from the flu shot:

“You cannot get sick from getting the flu shot. I know some people will swear they go the flu from the flu shot but what actually happens is there are so many different cold and flu viruses out there and the vaccine takes 7-10 days to become effective. If you have been exposed to a flu virus or a cold virus of some sort right around when you get the flu shot, that’s when people say they got it from the vaccine. Actually they didn’t, they were just exposed at the right time and the right place and came up with the right symptoms.”

A ten-year veteran of the Summit County Health Department, Nate Brooks worked as an Environmental Health Scientist until his recent promotion to Environmental Health Director. Before interviewing and being selected as director, Nate’s worked primarily focused around drinking water, septic systems, and water quality. He is also a lifelong resident of Summit County. In this episode of the healthcast, we talk about his expanded responsibilities, his plans for the Environmental Health, and what challenges he foresees Summit County facing in the future.

We’re joined in this episode by previous Environmental Health Director, Phil Bondurant. Phil talks about his new position as the Deputy Director of the Summit County Health Department, what his new responsibilities and roles are, what his vision is for the future of the health department, and more. We also discuss preliminary results from the Community Health Assessment and the challenges and opportunities the health department hopes to identify and address from the assessment.