An open house was held for the new Brownwood-Brown County Health Department, located at 305 Booker Street, on Wednesday afternoon.
Renovations for the 13,411 square foot facility that opened on Oct. 15 of 2024 cost $1,671,152, and includes a 52 person training area and meeting room space, a brand new designated teaching kitchen, four client/patient rooms with a specialized patient room for respiratory disease prevention, expanded lab space, expanded climate controlled storage, and more.
City of Brownwood Senior Citizens and Health Director Lisa Dick talked about the importance of the open house and giving the public a chance to see what all is offered at the Health Department.
“I’m excited about this because it’s an opportunity for us to tell people about all the services that we provide,” Dick said. “When we’re out in the public I think people are surprised whenever they talk to us and get to know a little bit about what we do. I think when you say Health Department everybody thinks about coming here and getting vaccines and a lot of us did that as children, but there’s so much more to it than just vaccines.”
As for the additional services the Health Department can now provide, Dick said, “We’ve expanded our lab services so we can do DOT drug screenings in addition to pre-employment and that is a service we felt was lacking in the community. We also have these tremendously large classrooms that provide space for us to do outreach and education, and right now we’re planning on doing one a quarter.”
The first educational program is slated to take place in February, which is Heart Health month.
“Dr. (Tom) Byrd is going to speak on how to prevent heart disease and our dietitian Meagan Williams is going to do some classes on healthy cooking,” Dick said. “We have a wonderful demonstration kitchen we’ll be using at the event in February, and those will be things we can do on a more regular basis and have enough space to do it.”
Dick also spoke about some of the perks of the move from the former location on Lee Street.
“It’s like night and day,” Dick said. “Dr. Byrd mentioned that it’s like living in a shack and now we’re living in a mansion on a hill. We have space for all of our staff, we do still have a couple of people that share offices, but before we had four people sharing one office, so it provides a little more privacy.”
WIC is also housed within the Health Department, as it was previously at the Lee Street location.