At the February 15 Nodaway County Health Center Board of Directors meeting, it was decided to move forward in making the second floor of the building ADA compliant.

Creal, Clark & Seifert Architects/Engineers, Inc., St. Joseph, were approved to provide architectural/engineering service for the MERIL entrance, stair and elevator access to the second floor. The fee is not to exceed $3,200.

The firm recommended that the entrance to MERIL be moved to allow access to the staircase going to the second floor. This will slightly decrease MERIL’s rental space. Administrator Tom Patterson said that MERIL sometimes needs meeting space and thought that allowing the use of the second floor meeting room would make up the difference.

Also, this move would be more cost efficient for the health department than moving the staircase.

The second part of the project involves installing a Limited Use Limited Application (LULA) elevator. These elevators are designed to service low occupancy commercial spaces, are fully automatic and similar in look and feel to larger commercial elevators. The LULA access would have two doors. One opening onto the ground floor lobby and the other opening onto the second floor. This will keep construction costs down on the project.

Patterson is looking into grants to help fund the project. The board has set aside $25,000 in this year’s budget.

Patterson plans to have the new staff take basic Emergency Planning Incident Command Courses in the spring.

A vaccine refrigerator has needed repair for the second time. The repairs will cost approximately $1,000. If the refrigerator breaks again, Patterson said it would be time to purchase a new unit at roughly $5,000.

Flu reports have increased nationally. The health center began seeing an influx of reports on January 18 after the last board meeting. There were 108 influenza A, five influenza B and four untyped influenza cases reported in January. Of those, 16 resided outside of Nodaway County.

On state funding, Patterson reported that the information he has received so far doesn’t seem to affect the health center’s operating budget for the next state fiscal year.