Public Health

The City of Racine Public Health Department provides many valuable services to the citizens of the City. Protecting the health of individuals, the community, and the environment leads to a better quality of life for residents and a cleaner region that is attractive to employers and visitors. The Public Health Department strives to maintain a high level of service and a diverse range of programs within budgetary constraints. This section contains information on the Department’s staffing and program statistics.

This is the organizational chart of the Public Health Department – Updated 2025

Enrollments in the Wisconsin Well Woman Program, covering Racine County and Suburban Milwaukee County, experienced a significant decline after 2019 but have started to rebound as of 2023.

Program changes, reductions in funding and changes in policy, have caused the number of clients annually served through the Community Health Division’s programs to fluctuate from year to year. There is general trend that service visits increase after the year 2022 following a decrease in 2019.

Animal bite incidents have remained relatively stable between 2019 and 2024, despite some fluctuations in individual years. NuisanceA person, thing, or circumstance causing inconvenience or annoyance. cases were widespread in early 2019 but have declined sharply since then, dropping by over 80% from their peak that year.

Pet licensing for both cats and dogs has remained relatively stable over the past few years, with a slight decline in dog licenses in 2024.

All forms of inspections, including those for restaurants and housing, saw a significant decline after 2019, although lead inspections remained relatively stable. Since 2019, inspections across all locations have begun to increase once again or stay relatively stable.

The child safety checks consist of the child passenger safety checks and cribs for kids safe sleep education provided by City of Racine. Since 2019, the City of Racine has provided more than 647 child safety checks with 2024 being the highest with 199.

Naloxone is a medication that reverses the effect of an opioid overdose. Over the course of past couple of years, the City of Racine Public Health Department has distributed more than 4877 doses from 2019 to 2024, with each year increasing with the effectiveness of saving lives from overdose.

Since 2021, 823 community members have been trained to effectively administer Naloxone, a medication crucial for reversing the life-threatening effects of opioid overdose and potentially saving lives.

The City of Racine provided more than 2763 safe and accessible syringe access encounters to it’s community from 2019 and 2024. With a sharp decline in 2021, it slowly started to increase in numbers of encounters for 2022-23.

The TB skin test is a tool used to test for latent and/or active TB infection. From 2019 to 2024, there has been a total of 1087 test conducted by the City of Racine Health Department with 2023 being the highest with 417 skin test.

The County Health Rankings from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the UW Population Health Institute ranks Wisconsin counties in several categories. Racine’s rankings are shown in the table above. The lower the number, the better the county’s ranking. For example, Racine County’s Overall Health ranking means that it ranks 61st out of 72 counties in the state, and that 60 counties in Wisconsin have better overall health. Racine County ranks low in the Physical Environment category, but fares better in the Clinical Care and Health Behaviors measures.