Chelan Douglas Health District Looking To Fill Alternate Position

The Chelan Douglas Health District has an opening for a health care provider to be an alternate member of its Health Board. 

The person selected will replace Dr. Kristen Hosey, who is leaving the board in order to take a position within the Health District itself. 

Health District Administrator Luke Davies says backup board members serve an important need, 

"One of the things that the county commissioners, who appoint the board pf health decided to do was create alternate positions to make sure that we always have representation, and we always have strong engagement to create a pipeline to make sure that we've always got coverage," said Davies.  

The board will be replacing Dr. Hosey with another health care provider as required by law. 

The state legislature passed a law last year, which modified the composition of local health boards across the state.  

It created guidelines for health districts to follow and required them to balance their governing boards with non-elected board members. 

A  two-county health district such as the Chelan-Douglas Health District must have an equal number of elected and non-elected people on its board, along with two commissioners from both counties. 

The current commissioners from both counties are Douglas  Commissioners Marc Straub (Board Chair) and Dan Sutton, and Chelan County Commissioners Kevin Overbay and Shon Smith.  

Non-elected members must include people in all of the following categories: 

• Health care providers, public health, and healthcare facilities 
• Consumers of public health who have faced significant health inequities 
• Community stakeholders, such as local nonprofits working with underrepresented people and the business community. 

Because the health district’s coverage area contains some Native American trust lands, one of the non-elected member positions must be a tribal representative selected by the American Indian Health Commission for Washington State. 

Final selection of the at-large board members will be decided by a majority vote of the two boards of county commissioners. 

Davies says whoever is selected as the health care provider alternate will fill an important backup role on the board. 

“One of the things that we experienced as an agency during COVID-19 was just so much tumult with turnover in staff,” Davies said. “And we really want to make sure that our board was in a really healthy place to have good representation from the community”