Local Health District Welcomes New Leader
For the past five years, the South Central Health District, which includes Southington, has been headed by Susan Lonczak. Lonczak helped to guide the community through the Covid-19 pandemic, and more recently has overseen substantial growth in its programs and staff.
Effective November 1, however, Lonczak will step down to take up a new leadership job in the state’s Department of Agriculture. Her successor, Jamie Luckhardt, will now be the point person for local public health.
“The last five years have been amazing in terms of our growth,” Lonczak said. “It’s nice to pass it along to someone who I think will do a great job taking it over.”
While South Central has its main office in the Weichsel Center on 196 North Main Street, it serves the three towns of Southington, Plainville, and Middlefield. The State of Connecticut mandates that it provide a variety of services involving public health outreach and monitoring. One of the most labor-intensive tasks is conducting health inspections for restaurants, salons, and certain infrastructure items like septic tanks. Lonczak has worked hard to make sure there are enough sanitarians, or health inspectors, to do that job.
“We are very heavy in restaurants and salons and all our regulated businesses,” she said. “When I walked in, there were two sanitarians. There were some vacancies, but it was almost like a desert island here. We now have a chief sanitarian, a supervising sanitarian, and four full-time sanitarians, which is so much better than where we were.”
Lonczak also led an effort to make inspection information more accessible to the public, by having it posted on the district’s website.
“We digitized all of our street files. That is up on our website, so it is free and you can look up properties. It is much easier from a FOIA perspective, and that freed up our staff to do more.”
She has steered more resources to outreach, adding a part-time nurse and another full-time staff member to work on community health, particularly in the school system. The district has also started an education campaign based around a large, cheerful dog named ‘Epi,’ which is short for ‘epidemiologist.’
“We got a mascot, a dog named ‘Epi.’ In addition to a lot of youth and family outreach, we’re making an ‘Epi’s World’ website. It has all kinds of resources for families about healthcare, with a child-facing side and a family side.”
Luckhardt, the incoming director, began her career in public health in Wallingford in 2016 as a volunteer for their medical reserve corps. She later worked in the Naugatcuk Health District as a community health educator, with a portfolio that included emergency preparedness.
During the Covid pandemic, she worked for the Meriden Health Department performing contact tracing, and developing quarantine procedures. She served as a liaison to the schools, often communicating with parents who were concerned about the disease and its repercussions for their children’s education.
Most recently she has taught in the Public Health Masters program at University of New Haven.
“She has a really diverse background in terms of experiences,” said Lonczak. “I think it’s going to be a really nice addition.”
She plans to spend the next few months getting a detailed grasp on the needs of the three towns. “You really need to understand your community,” Luckhardt said. “I plan to spend a portion of the next few months learning more about the needs of our district.”
While both seek to build awareness of public health and its specific challenges, they acknowledge that their work does not always receive much recognition.
“Public health is often invisible,” Luckhardt said. “If we’re doing a great job, then everything runs pretty smoothly.”
“A lot of things are done behind the scenes every day, never seen or heard, to protect our communities,” Lonczak added.
