NACCHO is delighted to welcome Dr. Joseph B. Hawes as a consultant to the National Program Office team. Dr. Hawes will assist Turning Point partnerships to achieve their vision of involving the communities in improving the health of their members. He brings to Turning Point experience in developing partnerships that enhance the delivery of community primary health care services at the local and state levels. A graduate of  the University of the West Indies, Dr. Hawes spent eleven years working first in the public hospital system and later as a private family practitioner in a rural community in  Jamaica. While in clinical practice, he developed and implemented a community health care delivery system through working in partnership with regional public health care clinic staff.

Dr. Hawes came to the United States in 1991. He worked in Neuro-Physiology research at Howard University before entering the Master of Public Health program at The George Washington University. There he focused on health services management, policy development, and community participation models.

After obtaining his MPH, Dr. Hawes was awarded a two-year research fellowship sponsored by the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He worked with South Carolina's Department of Health and Environmental Control Division of Maternal Child Health to improve the state's maternal mortality surveillance. At South Carolina, he left behind a Pregnancy Related Enhanced Surveillance System that improved reporting of maternal deaths in the state by 100 percent. Recently, he spent a month in Ethiopia making an epidemiolgical assessment for the development of health care projects aimed at improving maternal and child health.