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Replacing Spokane Health Officer Now Is A Bad Idea, Says Another WA Health Officer

Courtesy of the University of Washington

The Spokane County Board of Health will decide the fate of Health Officer Bob Lutz during a special meeting this afternoon [Thursday].

Setting aside the specifics of the case, one Spokane doctor who has done the job Lutz holds says a pandemic is the wrong time to make this change.

Dr. John McCarthy wears a lot of hats. He’s a family medicine doctor, an assistant dean at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the chief medical officer for the Native Project and the public health officer for Okanogan County.

“A health officer has to take the community’s health into perspective and pay attention to how to make a community, not an individual, healthy," McCarthy said.

Not every physician can be a good public health officer, he says, and there aren’t a lot of them around. During this pandemic and fraught political climate, he says the job has become a pressure cooker.

“Yesterday [Tuesday], the Yakima health officer stepped down. I’m not sure if that was due to duress," he said.

She’s not the first health officer during this pandemic to vacate the job. Now there’s the Lutz case and another that hits close to home for McCarthy.

“Last week, the day before Dr. Lutz was removed, I stepped down, as of January 1, because the work is a lot of work. It takes time. It’s not usually excellently recompensed. I can do better financially if I do other kinds of work, rather than working for the public. And so I think it’s going to be hard to find a good health officer. I do think you can find bad health officers. I don’t think that’s very difficult to do," he said.

McCarthy says Lutz knows his community, knows what has to be done and he’s good at it. If someone is brought in to replace him, McCarthy says the person will have a difficult job.

“I think the interim health officer that is found at this point has to be very adept at understanding what’s going on and my guess is you’re not going to find someone to step in that has that skill set," he said.

His advice: don’t replace your health officer during a pandemic.

“And I don’t know that we’ve figured that out yet," he said.