By Fox23.com News Staff
CLAREMORE, Okla. — The Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) broke ground on a new District 4 Warehouse in Claremore that’s set to address the health supply needs of eight local counties.
“This is a groundbreaking for our new warehouse, which is going to serve as a central hub for all of our supplies and materials across the district which covers the northeast corner of the state,” explained Dave Chissoe, the Regional Administrative Director for OSDH’s District 4. “…The facility itself will house storage, ground floor and mezzanine storage. It’ll be roughly around 8,000 square feet. It’ll also have a conference room and an office in there that will just kind of help with the distribution of everything.”
Chissoe said the new warehouse will help the district streamline its operations and medical supply distribution.
“It’s important so that we can manage our inventory and respond quicker to an emergency or health events across our entire district. It’ll make us just that much more efficient…[Our supplies] are currently housed and kind of spread out through our district, which is why this is so important that we can have a central distribution point that allows us to just respond quicker to everything that we’re doing.”
The new warehouse will also serve as a location where the public can receive mass medication distributions.
“It’s not just a warehouse. It will be also a place where we can do points of distribution from here. We’ll have two driving lanes as well so that we can do multiple drive-thru lanes for the community so we can distribute those kind of medications or vaccinations or whatever else just that much more efficiently.”
Chissoe said OSDH realized the need for this kind of warehouse and distribution point following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a struggle to say the least and as so many things that we did during COVID, it was kind of figuring it out on the fly. This is definitely a lesson learned from COVID about how to better be prepared for those kind of events as well. We thought if we are going to do that, we also want to have it serve during times when we aren’t having a major crisis.”
Chissoe said he hopes local residents will be happy to see the final product once construction is complete, knowing their tax dollars have built a facility aimed at protecting community health.
