As I mentioned before, one of the great things about this country is the ability to get involved in your government to make things happen. Well, today was another important step for the midwife group as they fulfilled an important part of the process outlined in a bill that was successfully run through the legislative [...]
The standards set by ADHS for the medical marijuana dispensaries made the big time today. The New York Times carried a story today that highlights the limited number of dispensaries in the state; the need for dispensaries to carefully secure, store and track the marijuana; and the medical director functions. The reporter interviewed dispensary applicants, some [...]
Last year our Agency pulled through big-time during our bottled water drive- collecting and donating 68,000 bottles of water for thirsty homeless folks. This month we’re having our 2nd annual Water Challenge with a goal of 75,000 bottles by the end of June. If we meet the goal of 75,000 bottles collected in June, we’ll all get [...]
It’s time for our Bureau of Women’s & Children’s Health and our Office of Children with Special Health Care Needs to complete their annual application for the Maternal and Child Health Title V Block Grant. When you hear “Title V”, people are talking about our maternal and child health prevention programs. These programs work with [...]
Aksel Laudon, a 6th-grade student at Kyrene Centennial Middle School in Phoenix, is this year’s “Be SunWise and Play Sun Smart” poster-drawing contest winner. Aksel’s drawing was selected by the Arizona Diamondbacks from more than 7,000 student poster entries. Aksel and his teacher Jeffrey Garrett, and their families will be celebrated at the June 5 DBacks game in a pre-game award ceremony on [...]
Our Arizona Cancer Registry scored a coveted Gold rating from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) this week for having complete and accurate data suitable for calculating complete and accurate incidence statistics. We’ve received Silver ratings for the last several years- but this year we got the Gold for our increased its data completeness [...]
There’s an old tale about a Texas “Sharpshooter” that pulls his pistol out of his holster and shoots at the broad side of a barn pretty much at random without aiming. Then he goes up to the barn with a paintbrush and draws a circle around the bullet holes and says: “See, I have perfect [...]
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts- we’re in the beginning phases of overhauling our regulations for licensing behavioral health facilities. This’ll be a long process- and the finish line is in mid-2013. We’re starting with a set of what we’ll call “straw-man” language that we can use as a way to start the discussions. We’ve [...]
It’s hard to believe- but our Smoke Free Arizona program turned 5 this month. Voters approved the Act back in November of ’06 by a few percentage points. The Initiative language gave us a super-short turn-around time (just like medical marijuana)… and we turned the key on the program by May of ’07. Implementation of the [...]
People get hurt because of unsafe acts and unsafe conditions. It’s always easier to deal with unsafe conditions- because you can often make a system change and have an impact. Changing unsafe acts (behaviors) is a lot harder. Anyway- a new report came out this week called The Facts Hurt: A State by State Injury [...]
