As Juliann Van Liew begins her new position as the director of the Polk County Health Department, she’ll also be pursuing her Doctor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, caring for two young kids and carving out time for exercising and baking. 

Her keys to balancing it all: successful time management and many 4:30 a.m. starts. 

That skill will come in handy in a new role that will oversee and manage many different programs that work to improve the health of the community, monitor health outcomes, improve existing initiatives while developing and implementing new ones, respond to emergencies and collect data, among many other responsibilities. 

Van Liew knows the area well. She was born and raised in Des Moines and attended Drake University before receiving her master’s in public health from the University of Minnesota. 

“I was raised by very active, community-driven professional parents who really instilled in me early the belief that we have a collective responsibility to care for one another in our communities, and that by working together, we create the communities that we want to live in,” she said. 

Her dad worked as an assistant county attorney for many years, while her mom worked as a health care leader in Des Moines and the Twin Cities. 

“I watched them really find ways to put their beliefs into practice in professional settings that can really impact, oftentimes, the most vulnerable people in our communities,” Van Liew said. “So I was really lucky to have role models from a young age who showed me how important it is to figure out what your passions are and find ways to kind of live them out in your career.”

Van Liew discovered her own passion was public health, which initially developed from her first love of maternal and child health, during her undergraduate career. 

After getting her master’s, Van Liew spent a little over three years as program manager for Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis before becoming public health planning and operations manager and later public health director of Unified Government of Wyandotte County in Kansas. 

She moved back to Des Moines in March 2023 to become the preventative health director for the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. 

In December 2024, she was named the next director of the Polk County Health Department, succeeding Helen Eddy, who recently retired from the position. 

The Business Record recently met with Van Liew to discuss her experiences working in public health, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning her new position at the Polk County Health Department, and what she’s most looking forward to in the new role.

The Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

How do you feel like all of your different experiences working in public health, including during a pandemic, have helped prepare you for this role?

You have to start with a really foundational understanding of public health in order to lead well within a public health system. The whole ethos of public health is that health really derives not just from our health care providers or our access to clinical care; health derives from the communities that we live within. Most of what produces our health outcomes as a community is driven by upstream factors like, “Do I have access to a great education at my public school down the street? Do I have access to economic opportunity? Do I have access to the transportation I need to apply for and have an interview for that job? Am I living in a safe and welcoming community?” These upstream drivers are creating systemic conditions that can either make it harder for someone to be healthy, or they can make it easier. For public health, we always come at it from a vantage point of needing to work on those upstream drivers of health, as well as making sure we can then provide clinical care to those vulnerable populations at the same time. 

When you’re a leader in a pandemic or a health department or this kind of space, you have to constantly be thinking about, “How are we managing and meeting the demands of the day? How are we making sure we’re getting those mass vaccination sites ready? How are we making sure we have appointments at the right time for our populations who need them on the weekend? How are we making sure we’re kind of closing that safety net gap?” But we have to be doing that at the same time that we’re working with our partners on things like housing and education and transportation and all these upstream things. 

When you can understand that coming in and take both of those into consideration at the same time, it allows you to make sure you’re balancing your priorities and you’re focusing on the right things. The other thing you have to learn and understand as a public health leader is that everyone doesn’t understand public health, and so you really have to be willing to meet folks where they are, help them understand why we’re focusing on the things that we’re focusing on, and how, when we work together as partners in different sectors across the county, we can do a lot more good together than we can in our own roles. It also requires a very strong understanding and grasp of data and how to work with all the secondary data that’s out there and available for you, as well as primary data that you collect, and making sure that that data is what’s driving you. That data is what’s telling us that we have food insecurity issues here in Polk County. We just published our Community Health Needs Assessment, which is very robust, with Polk, Dallas and Warren, and I’m incredibly excited to be walking into a health department that has such a robust and recently published Community Health Needs Assessment. But we need to be looking at that now as one of our guideposts for where we focus our time and our energies and our resources. Looking forward, we need to be following that data and then working upstream and providing client care to those who need it all at the same time.

What’s one thing you wish people knew more about public health or better understood about it?

I wish more folks understood that public health is actually an activity. We do public health together when we decide that we have collective goals that are the same. I think for many, unfortunately, because of the way the pandemic was handled in some communities, public health, in their minds, has become punitive. That’s not who we are and what we do. There are times when we need to make sure that someone isolates or quarantines because they have a really infectious disease that can really harm others around them. But by and large, public health is an activity of us coming together and deciding, OK, food insecurity is an issue here. We’re going to bring in grocers and we’re going to bring in food pantries and the health department and others and decide, “What do some new ways of thinking about this look like?”

I really wish folks understood that what we’re trying to do collectively in public health is create conditions in our community where it’s easier for folks to be healthy. We sometimes like to just pin things on health behavior and say, “If only they were exercising more, if only they had made these better choices.” You don’t have much of a choice to exercise when you’re very low income, you’re working two jobs, you don’t have time, and you don’t have a vehicle to get to a gym down the block. And so for us, it’s about, yes, people need to make healthy decisions, but they can’t make healthy decisions when none of the decisions in front of them are healthy. So it’s making communities where those decisions to be healthy exist for people, and then educating them and encouraging them to then follow through with those behaviors.

What’s the transition to the public health director position been like so far? 

I just got started. I am incredibly lucky. I got to have a 30-day overlap with Helen Eddy, which very rarely happens. I think especially in government, it’s hard to actually get that overlapping time together. I’m meeting with the staff. This is clearly a very committed and expert staff who knows what they’re doing. We have a lot of folks that have been here for a long time, which says a lot about the culture here, about the staff’s commitment to the health of Polk County. It’s fantastic. I’m just incredibly excited to be here, and within the next few weeks, we’ll be meeting with my whole staff, but also starting to meet with a lot of community partners and picking up where Helen left off, making sure those relationships, which are one of the most foundational parts of us being successful, are really nurtured and fostered. 

How have you been able to balance all the work with starting this new position, pursuing your doctorate and taking care of your family? 

I manage my time well because I also have little ones. I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old. I do it with a lot of help. I am lucky to live near my folks and have their help and support. I have a phenomenal life partner who supports me in everything I do; he’s fantastic. But I’m an incredibly driven person. One of the other things we haven’t talked quite as much about is the fact that policymaking is a huge component of public health. It’s part of making sure we have healthy communities and systems. As we’re making policies around where the public transportation sector goes, or what we’re allowing for planning and development opportunities, all those things have health ramifications. There’s a piece there around helping ensure that our elected officials and our partners are considering health outcomes when they’re making policies that sometimes don’t seem like they’re health related. That is a particular passion of mine because public health can do more good when we’re making sure that others are considering public health in the work they’re doing. 

I’m pursuing my Doctor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins partly because they have a specific policy track, and it’s allowing me to get really in-depth experience and exposure to some of the world’s best experts in public health work at large, but in public health policy, making and building communities and systems that promote health. It’s something that’s making me better, and I’m a person who’s always going to continue to do whatever I can to make myself the most effective public health leader that I can be. But in reality, it looks like a lot of 4:30 mornings spent getting a couple hours of school work in before the kids are up and before work and a lot of late nights. But this is my calling and my passion, and everything I’m learning in school, I’m turning around and translating and using immediately. That’s also highly rewarding and makes me know I’m spending my time well if I can turn around and use what I’m learning the next day a lot of times. So we do the best we can. I’m lucky to love the work that I do, to love what I’m studying, and to have a fantastic family. Those really are the only ways any of that is possible.

Work-life balance is a topic that’s been getting a lot of attention. Do you have any tips for managing that? 

I think you have to choose the ways that work the best for you. For me, the sweet-spot hours of having my kids in the evening from 5-8 p.m., those are holy and sacred in my house. I’m not working from 5 to 8, unless there is a true catastrophic emergency because for me, a priority as a mom has to be spending  quality time with them. That’s one of the ways where I feel balance, and they deserve that from me. You can’t be everything as a mom, you can’t be everything as a boss, you can’t be everything as a student. But you figure out where your priorities are, and you figure out what are those things that can bring you the most joy and the most fulfillment, and you carve time out of your day for them. It’s about making conscious choices, I think, day in and day out about how you want to have spent your time.

What are you most looking forward to about the new position? 

I think one of the things I’ve missed a bit in the state because I was a little further removed from the work, and one of the reasons I love local government public health so much is that you really are working with partners consistently. I have a long list of folks to connect with, but to be sitting down and working with health care systems, hospitals, clinics, but also with folks doing important transportation work and providing refugee services and working with child care centers, there’s just an amazing amount of partners who you can do good with depending on, “What are their goals? What are your goals? How do you find that space?” I think continuing to build the legacy that Helen is leaving me, which is to be a true collaborative community partner is one of the things I’m most excited for. But I also really love leading a team. I love mentoring young leaders. I love watching people grow and kind of become the leader that they have inside them that sometimes just needs some fostering and some experience and some exposure, so I’m really looking forward to that. And I’m looking forward to continuing to capitalize on some of the really cool stuff they’re doing right now. I think Polk County’s gun violence prevention work around Talk it Up, Lock it Up, the safe bars work that the county has been pushing lately, there’s some really innovative, cool stuff that’s happening in this county that isn’t happening in most counties throughout the state. Getting to participate and push forward some of those new, emerging public health issues is something that gets me really excited and motivated, too.

Are there any specific programs you’re looking to expand or introduce? 

I don’t want to pin myself to anything. It’s a time of deep assessment for me. The next three to six months will really be about understanding at a deep level what’s the state of health in our community, which I’ve started to do quite a bit of, and I lived here for several decades. Also really intimately getting to know my staff, their qualifications, their passions and what they’re doing, and then find those gaps. There’s certainly work to be done. With cancer as our leading cause of death here in Polk County, there’s probably additional stuff for us to think about in the cancer space and chronic disease being what it is. But I also have a passion to make sure that those upstream drivers of health are also a critical part of our work as well. Back to the beginning, it’ll be that balance of supporting the clinical needs our community has and doing a lot of the strategy building around those upstream drivers of health.

What hobbies do you have that you enjoy outside of work?

I spend a lot of time with my weights and my rowing machine, so that’s the other part of my self-care routine that happens every day, without fail. It’s movement and physical activity for my body, but for my mental health more than anything. And then when I have a bit of time on the side, I love to bake, that’s my other thing. It’s kind of our season right now. But I spend most of my time with my family and my loved ones, who all live quite near me, which is fantastic. And otherwise, I’m just being nerdy, reading up on public health things or staying abreast of any reports and all of that kind of good stuff. 

Is there anything in particular that you enjoy baking? 

I love making fruitcake, and most people hate fruitcake. I would love to convince the world that homemade, fresh fruitcake is the best because it is. Nobody really believes it yet, but I’m going to keep working on that. I make a lot of fruitcake and a lot of German stollen, which is a fantastic German bread. I think I’m secretly a 90-year-old woman at heart.

Is there anything else you feel like people should know about public health or about you?

Public health is for everybody, regardless of if you’re literally partnering with us today, or if you’re just the beneficiary of some of the work we do. Some of the most important successes we have in public health are things that no one will ever see. No one sees the outbreak that we prevented. Nobody’s worried about the fact that there’s no smog in the air if we have clean air because it was prevented. If we don’t have chronic disease trends going in the wrong direction, nobody’s probably going to really remark on that very much. A lot of our wins, a lot of the good we do for the community, it can be invisible and it can be hard for folks to understand, “Oh, that’s really the preventive upstream work,” not just of the public health department, but the public health system, which is us and health care providers and social services and all those sorts of things. I want folks to know that public health is really trying to build communities and systems, oftentimes behind the scenes, but that we’re here and ready to partner with anyone new who has health issues going on, who wants to talk to us about the data we have, how to plan public health strategy, how to build partnerships. We’re here for that. I want folks to think of us as a resource, certainly. 

I just feel so much gratitude for Helen, who has spent the last eight years building a reputable health department, and that’s not the case all over. There are a lot of communities that don’t trust their health departments, and I think this community does trust this health department because Helen’s been transparent and communicative throughout the pandemic. She has great partnerships in all corners of the community. I’m walking into a department that doesn’t need to be overhauled because it’s had great leadership. To be able to walk into a well-functioning place and really just get to continue to push and then build my own vision and direction, that doesn’t always happen when you take on a big new leadership role. Sometimes you have to come in and clean up. I don’t have to come in and clean up. I get to come in and mentor and provide direction and just help us make sure we’re living out our full public health mandate.