MARSHALL — While Southwest Health and Human Services has made “great strides” over the past year, it still faces struggles in areas like hiring and retaining staff, agency leaders said this week.

“Over the last two years or so, it feels like all we are doing is hiring,” said SWHHS deputy director Nancy Walker. Walker said the hiring landscape “is a tough one,” with higher turnover among employees who had worked for the agency for a year or less.

Division directors of SWHHS, which serves a six-county area including Lyon County, gave an update on the agency for Lyon County commissioners on Tuesday. They went over topics ranging from SWHHS’ financial health and HR activities, to updates on public health and social services programs.

“Over the past seven years, we’ve made great strides in financial health,” said Beth Wilms, director of health and human services at SWHHS. While SWHHS was not able to add to its reserve funds by the end of 2024, it does currently have four months of reserves. “It’s a great place to be at,” Wilms said.

Wilms said SWHHS was facing some increased costs for staffing and benefits in 2025. Starting this year a 4% across-the-board wage increase went into effect, plus a differential of $3 an hour for child protection workers and public health nurses.

At the same time, SWHHS was not seeking to add any new staff positions, Wilms said.

Walker said positions like public health nurses have been hard for SWHHS to fill. There were currently five openings, she said. Some social work positions were also harder to fill. Overall, SWHHS had between 12 and 15 openings at any given time, Nelson said.

SWHHS social services division director Cindy Nelson said they had about four new child protection workers start in about the past two months. Nelson said the agency has a total of 18 child protection staff serving six counties. Of the total number of child protection staff, eight had been working there for less than a year, she said.

“It’s kind of concerning when you don’t have the longevity and the experience of staff,” she said.

Nelson said overall, the region has been “pretty stable” in the number of social services cases it has. In a given month, about 3,300 cases were being served by 110 social workers and case aides, she said.

SWHHS was seeing a decrease in some kinds of cases, like substance use and adult mental health holds. But others, like adult protection cases and children’s mental health cases, were up, Nelson said.

Nelson also spoke about trends in child care licensure in the six-county area. There were 50 fewer in-home day care providers in the area, and 12 fewer child foster care homes, she said.

“I think some of that is because of the standards, the expectations that are put on those day care providers. I think COVID was very difficult for providers,” Nelson said. “But we have about the same number of slots available for day care in our county, and that is because we have seen a couple more (child care) centers open in our six counties.”