Health Care

Interview Issue: Lawrence Sands

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Photo: Richard Brian

Lawrence Sands

Chief health officer, Southern Nevada Health District

Interviewed June 26 by phone

Do you think Vegas gets a bad rap for the quality of its health care?

In general I think they do. Even though a lot has gone on here that’s gotten a lot of notoriety over the last few years, those are, as I see it, outliers that [don’t] really represent the kind of quality and expertise that many physicians do have. … We’re still relatively very young as a medical community … we haven’t had the kind of maturation in older communities, and that plays a role. Since I’ve been here, the one driving force … the one factor that seems to drive what we see happen here in health care is just that we have a shortage of all kinds of health professionals. That certainly creates a lot of challenges for both patients and providers. That’s why it’s so important to work together with the School of Medicine and Touro University and UNLV and all the different nursing programs and other health-profession programs.

Does the economic slowdown help us readdress that imbalance?

At least on paper that may make it look like it’s improving the physician-to-population ratio, but the thing is that, particularly if health-care reform were to happen ... then think about it, you’re already adding into an overburdened system without expanding the number of health professionals and facilities. Regardless of where the growth is going … it doesn’t change the fact that we need to find ways to both attract health professionals here to the community as well as have programs to train more health professionals in the community.

What’s been your proudest moment as head of SNHD?

I would say a couple things. Most recently how the health district really worked to address the H1N1 swine flu influenza outbreak this year. Not only how we responded, we tried to respond in a very calm, evidence-based approach, tried to use a very rational approach to fit the needs in Southern Nevada, and hopefully to be able to minimize panic and alarm. It also showed how well people in the district pulled together and worked as a team across multiple programs and divisions …

What’s the biggest misconception people have about the health district?

People expect that we do the same things as a hospital or a clinic, that we provide health care. … Our mission is to prevent and slow the transmission of disease in our community.

What’s long-term?

We’re having major reductions in revenue because property-tax values are going down, and then there’s been a redistribution of property taxes between the county and the state, and that impacts our budget as well, and that’s happening at the same time when there’s even greater need in the community. We’re here for the long haul. … It’ll require us to be more aggressive in finding diversified funding sources: grants, foundations and contracting for different services, and looking for different ways we can provide services to the community.

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