One of the key elements of our Strategic Plan is to “Build Public Health Value.” One of the best ways to do that is to tell good stories that capture people’s attention and imagination- stories that highlight the value of public health. During our Division of Licensing’s employee recognition event last week, Larry Martens read [...]
On June 18, we held a news conference with the Arizona March of Dimes and the Arizona Perinatal Trust to officially launch a new campaign to reduce preventable preterm births. We got great coverage this week, including a FOX News interview that aired in several other cities across the country. We’ve joined a national challenge issued by [...]
Quite a show of teamwork from all our staff today as they moved more than 60 thousand bottles of water out of storage into a huge pile in the parking lot of 1740. But the work wasn't done – they loaded all that water into trucks, trailers and vans to be distributed throughout Maricopa County [...]
Remember the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic? That brand new virus that caused the pandemic was a combination of RNA from four different flu viruses – North American swine influenza, North American avian influenza, human influenza, and swine influenza virus typically found in Asia and Europe. The natural laboratories for new influenza viruses that end up causing pandemics [...]
Our own Madan Gopal from I.T. has been invited by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to participate in a national Roundtable discussion about the role and use of health IT to fill the needs of behavioral health providers, to integrate behavioral health record data into primary care, and on how ”Meaningful Use” could [...]
The 3 bears submitted by Fish & Game to our State Lab ended up being negative for the deadly rabies virus. These bears are thought to be connected to the bear attacks, which happened in and around Payson recently. If separate DNA test results that were sent by Fish & Game for testing match the bears [...]
One of the balancing acts that folks living with disabilities face is how to navigate employment opportunities and still keep the services that keep them healthy and able to work in the first place. There’s a great new statewide resource that can help folks with disabilities and their families make informed decisions. It’s a web [...]
Some of our Laboratory scientists (Kathryn Fitzpatrick, Alexandra Bhatti, Heather Bickley and Charles Martin) are busy right now testing the brains of the 2 bears that were destroyed over the weekend to see if they had rabies. You might have heard about the bear attacks, which happened in and around Payson recently. On Sunday, a [...]
About a year ago Ben Bobrow, MD (our EMS Medical Director) came into my office with a great idea to set up a program to train 911 dispatchers in better ways to coach callers through CPR instructions so callers can do a better job before the paramedics get there. The problem was money. So I sent him [...]
We have a couple of new projects in the works to ensure that the dispensary system reflects a medical rather than a recreational system. We’re working with Arizona's pharmacy/poison control systems to put together a contract to provide technical assistance and educational materials to the future dispensary medical directors. We’re also putting together a contract [...]
