Gov. Maura Healey signed the Statewide Accelerated Public Health for Every Community (SAPHE 2.0) bill in late November on the coattails of a $4 billion economic development bond bill. Now roughly four years in the making, local health officials say the law will modernize local health care, with the most drastic changes expected in rural Massachusetts towns.

SAPHE 2.0, filed by state Sen. Jo Comerford and state Rep. Hannah Kane, creates minimum public health standards for every Massachusetts community, dedicates state funding to support local boards of health and health departments, ensures public health workers hold the necessary credentials, and creates a uniform data collection and reporting system to be used across cities and towns.

The law implements recommendations of the Special Commission on Local and Regional Public Health, issued in June 2019, as well as recommendations from a report of the Joint Committee on COVID-19 and Emergency Preparedness and Management, which was issued in June 2022.

Franklin Regional Council of Governments Director of Community Health Phoebe Walker, who advocated for the law since it was first introduced and served on the Special Commission on Local and Regional Public Health, said the law is expected to modernize local health care, with its most drastic changes expected in the most rural areas.

“The most fundamental change is that we will finally have performance standards, workforce credentials, state support and a data collection system,” Walker said. “Amazingly, in the 21st century, we didn’t have any of that until now. This legislation basically means we are finally going to have a modern local public health system like 49 other states.”

The importance of state-set health care standards across municipalities, Walker noted, was pushed to the forefront during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Without state mandates for towns to hire public health nurses or to undergo communicable disease control, Walker said more than 200 Massachusetts cities and towns did not have standardized contact tracing during quarantine.

“That resulted in unnecessary deaths and a massive infusion of money that got invested in nonprofits to create a private sector public health nursing program that was the Contact Tracing Collaborative,” Walker recounted. “We spent $160 million as a state on getting people up and running to do contact tracing who weren’t working for local health departments. This is going to make sure that that doesn’t happen again.”

Echoing the remarks of Massachusetts Public Health Alliance Deputy Director Oami Amarasingham, Walker said that with increased funding to local health departments, cities and towns will be better equipped to tackle some of the larger public health issues facing the region, such as climate change-related natural disasters or the opioid epidemic.

Walker elaborated that the infusion of state funds would make it possible for municipalities to launch or expand naloxone distribution programs or emergency preparedness education programs.

“For too long our local public health workforce has been stretched to the breaking point, responding to a relentless stream of public health challenges — from devastating weather events fueled by climate change to the opioid crisis and the viral spread of health disinformation,” Amarasingham said in a statement last week.

In April 2023, 80 local officials, including Walker, former Greenfield Mayor Roxann Wedegartner and Public Health Nurse Megan Tudryn, sent a joint letter to legislative leaders requesting that SAPHE 2.0 be prioritized for urgent passage.

Walker said that since Massachusetts is a state that prioritizes local government, the law’s passage will open the door to a more regional approach to public health.

“There are regional forms of government in just about every other state, and here we don’t have regional government in that way,” Walker said. “We’ve been able to get sort of a preview of what the bill is going to look like, because for the last three years we’ve been spending [American Rescue Plan Act] money in this state on essentially a voluntary part of what this bill is going to make involuntary. … We have these public health excellence grants. Every single town in Franklin County and the North Quabbin is in a public health excellence grant, so we’re already in the process of looking together at what is it that this health department can’t quite handle alone and what would they like to share at a regional level instead.”

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.