Approximately 20,000 folks are seen in the AZ emergency departments for a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Of these 1,000 die and 4,500 are hospitalized. At least 2% of the U.S. population has a TBI-related long-term need for help to perform activities of daily living. So, needless to say, brain injury is a major public health issue. There’s growing [...]
We began working over 2 years ago with the State Procurement Office to initiate a statewide e-procurement system called Procure AZ. The goal of the statewide system is transparency of all procurement actions, cost reductions, and a more efficient use of time and resources by reducing purchasing timelines. We started using the new system on [...]
A recent report in Surgery News found that a six-month "process improvement project" that added a simple hand-washing question to the daily ICU checklist decreased the rate of central line-associated bloodstream infections in a surgical ICU.
Congrats to the Arizona Peer and Family Coalition for rolling out their new user friendly website last week. The Coalition is a group of people from AZ’s behavioral health community, including peers, family members, government representatives, and providers. Their mission is to advocate for statewide behavioral Health policy development by peers and family members. Their [...]
Trauma remains a big problem in Arizona; it’s the leading cause of death for folks under 44 and nearly 27,000 people suffered injuries severe enough to be cared for in trauma centers in 2009. We’ve been working hard over the last few years to recruit new rural hospitals into the trauma system as Level IV [...]
Public health efforts eradicated smallpox from the globe in the late 1970s. The last naturally occurring case was in Somalia in 1977 (followed by a couple of lab accident cases in 1978). Public health set its sites on Polio next- with an expectation that it could be eradicated before the turn of the century. A [...]
In the past few years, many public health programs have been changing their usual way of doing business to become more efficient while still delivering high quality products. Our AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) is a federally-funded program that delivers life-saving medicine to low-income folks living with HIV/AIDS. Our team created a new program called [...]
The CDC launched their new CDC Funding Assistance Data and Profiles site this week. The website provides quick access to information on CDC’s funding in states and territories like grants and cooperative agreements to state and local health departments, universities, and other public and private agencies for a variety of public health programs.
As we get closer to implementing the AZ Medical Marijuana Act in mid-April, I thought it might be a good idea to post some information that may be helpful to physicians and prospective qualifying patients. Over the last weeks, I’ve been sent a number of articles and sources of information about the medical use of [...]
We received more than 1,500 comments on our second draft of the medical marijuana rules- bring the total number of comments to more than 3,000. We’ve posted all the comments on our hub website http://www.azdhs.gov/prop203/ (with personal information and foul language removed). We’ll be examining the suggestions over the coming weeks and expect to publish [...]
