Hooker Odom's departure leaves challenges at Health & Human Services

DHHS faces major challenges

The head of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services will take a new job later this year, leaving a department that faces significant challenges in caring for some of the state's most vulnerable people.

Carmen Hooker Odom, a former lobbyist and Massachusetts legislator, said Friday she will be president of the Milbank Memorial Fund, a health-care policy foundation based in New York. Her departure date is not firm, but she must start her new job by Oct. 1.

For the past six and half years, she has headed one of the state's largest agencies, overseeing the welfare of millions of North Carolinians through Medicaid programs, public health initiatives such as childhood vaccines, child care programs, older adult care, disability services and mental health.

It is mental health that may serve as her largest legacy and source of most criticism. She had been facing increasing dissatisfaction for the way she guided changes in the state mental health system during the last five years. Through that endeavor, she angered and frustrated state legislators, private companies that provide mental health services, families of people with mental illnesses and local government mental health offices.

"I think she's a very smart lady," said Frank Edwards, president of National Alliance on Mental Illness-Wake County, "but her style was so confrontational."

Criticism escalated a month ago when the department abruptly cut the rate it paid companies that provide for a basic mental health service to more than 30,000 people a month. Gov. Mike Easley fielded requests to fire her, or to at least assign someone new to tackle mental health.

Easley responded to calls for her ouster with public statements of support. He and Hooker Odom emphasized Friday that she has had plans for months to leave for the health-care policy foundation, where she has served as a member of the board.

"Secretary Odom told me in January that she had this extraordinary opportunity to have a nationwide, even global, impact on critical health policies," Easley said in a statement. "I wish her all the best in her new endeavor and I appreciate her effective leadership and hard work during the past six years as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. She has handled one of the most challenging jobs in the state with great skill and compassion for all those the department touches."

Hooker Odom said in an interview that her announcement had nothing to do with the recent mental health disputes.

"I believe I'm one of very few secretaries who have cared and taken on that issue as a very important part of my responsibility," she said. "I'm very proud of the fact that no day has gone by in my 6 1/2 years that I have not had that reform effort as part of my thinking and part of my things that I work on."

Critics happy

Critics who have called for a new leader said they are happy she's leaving. Edwards, with the Wake County advocacy group, said her departure "clears the air an awful, awful lot."

Hooker Odom, 62, has been a visible leader. Named to the post two years after the death of her husband, former UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Michael Hooker, she later married a former legislator, Fountain Odom of Charlotte.

She was considered an effective lobbyist and met with employees at state hospitals and mental retardation centers around the state. She took an American sign language class to help her communicate with hearing-impaired employees.

She leaves an agency of 18,000 employees responsible for more than $13.7 billion in spending, much of that in Medicaid. The state is spending about $4.2 billion on the department this year.