Welcome
The Public Health & Safety Division (PHSD) oversees the coordination of the public health system in Montana. The State's public health system is a complex, multi-faceted enterprise, requiring many independent entities to unite around the goal(s) of health improvement and disease prevention at the community-level. These entities include local City/County Health Departments, private medical providers and hospitals, local Emergency Medical Services, Emergency Management agencies and other units of local government. The public health system is a part of the continuum of care available to the citizens of Montana and the PHSD promotes and supports both the availability and the quality of public health services available to Montanans. These programs range in scope from nutrition support and Health Education (e.g., WIC & Tobacco Use Prevention) to screening services (e.g., Breast & Cervical Cancer screening programs for uninsured women and HIV Counseling & Testing services) to preventive services (e.g., Immunization) and surveillance systems for infectious and chronic diseases, designed to detect and target those health threats that may impact a community. However, virtually all public health programs share the common feature of relying on activities undertaken at the community-level to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy and include organized efforts, developed and implemented with local involvement, to prevent, identify, and counter threats to the health of the public at large.
