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Gupta ready for chief health officer role

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The executive director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department is ready to take on his new role as the state’s chief health officer with the DHHR’s Bureau for Public Health.

Dr. Rahul Guptta
Dr. Rahul Gupta

Dr. Rahul Gupta was named to the job on Dec. 4 and will assume the position to start the new year.

“I’m deeply honored and I’m looking forward to the new position at the state level,” Gupta told MetroNews last week. “And to help take a deliberative look at the challenges and opportunities facing the Bureau of Public Health.”

As for those challenges, there are many he is looking forward to tackling with the staff.

“We’re looking at the obesity rates, the diabetes, the heart disease, obviously the drug overdoses and drug addiction, as well as the overdose deaths. There’s no shortage of challenges,” he said. “At the same time, we have a great opportunity to do something about it.”

The plan, he said, is to work with health departments across the state, collecting data, researching it and then learning from it.

“It all involves developing a strategy, a vision and moving forward based and grounded in science and data, and having a good amount of and set of evaluative measures in addition to putting in additional quality improvement,” according to Gupta.

These measures must then be constantly updated to create success in the future, rather than only in the present.

Dr. Gupta will join the bureau having worked with the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department for the past five years. In that time, the department has received national acclaim, with the potential to be the first nationally accredited department in the state.

He gives the credit for the success to the board of health and the staff he worked with. Working on the local level, he feels, was a good precursor to his new job.

“It hits home the challenges that localities and communities face on a daily basis and it prepares you well to take on a task as this,” Gupta said. “You’re grounded constantly by the wealth of that experience at a local level.”

Gupta earned his M.D. from University College of Medical Sciences, University of Delhi, then a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Before working with the KCHD, he served as assistant professor of medicine of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., assistant professor of medicine at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and a primary care physician at Florida Medical Clinic.

At the bureau, he will replace Dr. Letitia Tierney, who will step down on Dec. 31, 13 months after beginning the job.





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