About

The Great Meadows Public Health Collaborative (GMPHC) was established through two grants awarded from the State of Massachusetts’ Public Health Excellence program and Contact Tracing and Case Investigation funding. These grants give an opportunity for improvement in local public health capacity and is an investment in providing core public health services to the community for the future of local public health in Massachusetts. GMPHC is comprised of seven municipalities: Bedford, Carlisle, Concord, Lincoln, Sudbury, Wayland, and Weston. The main goal of GMPHC is to collaboratively pool resources, increase staff capacity and expertise, attract additional funding and deliver better health protections, programs and outcomes.

In more recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed many challenges in local health departments across Massachusetts, but limited staffing has been a challenge for local public health throughout the state for quite some time. The idea of regionalizing ultimately means more capacity to provide high-quality programs and services to more towns. Now, as the Health Departments work to return to traditional services, shared services are available to provide that additional support to local health departments. Shared services such as GMPHC can provide pandemic response activities (such as case investigation and tracing) while also helping to bolster essential core public health services in our communities such as inspections, health promotion, and immunizations.