Around the Country, State Emergency Medical Services offices are looking for ways to help returning Veterans with medical experience find employment in the EMS industry. We’ll be making it a priority in 2014 to engage more Veterans with EMS experience to use their skills in Arizona’s progressive EMS and Trauma System. We have a couple [...]
Today we published Arizona’s first ever comprehensive State Health Assessment. The objective of the State Health Assessment is to give Arizona’s public health and health care systems a clear tool to help drive future decision-making and resource allocation as we collectively design and implement evidence-based interventions to improve health and wellness outcomes across Arizona. The [...]
Last week we had a visit from CMS (Medicare) to check on our plan of correction from a Survey that was conducted last fall at the Civil Units. Although we won’t get a final report for a while… we do know that Team ASH did a great job during the survey- ensuring that the surveyors [...]
On previous Blogs I’ve shared information about Community Integrated Paramedicine. One of the most promising opportunities for Community Paramedicine is in working with hospitals to prevent readmission of patients with diseases like diabetes, asthma or congestive heart failure. It’s also a great opportunity for EMS providers to provide some coaching on other prevention initiatives including [...]
The child safety seat exchange program we established as cooperative partnership via the Arizona-Mexico Commission last summer is moving forward. We’ve established a new partnership with Rural Metro and Southwest Ambulance to serve as collection sites for people who want to donate their gently used car seat that will be donated to families in Sonora. [...]
I just got back from attending the 2014 Comisión Sonora-Arizona meeting (the sister Commission to the Arizona-Mexico Commission). The theme for this year’s Fall/Winter Sonora Plenary was, “Energy Transforms Sonora and Arizona.” I co-chair the Health Services Committee along with Dr. William Neubauer. On the Sonora side, the Health Services Committee is co-chaired by Dr. [...]
As the Olympics begin, Chef and Registered Dietitian Allen Tran’s words come to mind, “nutrition can make a good athlete great or a great athlete good”. I think his view holds some truth for all of us. Allen knows because he is the High-Performance Chef for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. He is in [...]
CDC’s 2013 Prevention Status Reports have just been released publicly on CDC’s website. You’ll find reports specific to Arizona on topics like nutrition, physical activity, teen pregnancy, tobacco use, HIV, heart disease, motor vehicle crashes, and prescription drug abuse. Reports include a few data indicators of how we compare to the U.S., as well as [...]
Last summer a Superior Court judge decided that a portion of our medical marijuana regulations are unreasonable because our regulations didn’t have a process for dispensary registration certificate holders to renew their dispensary registration certificate if they didn't earn their approval to operate within 1 year. This week we posted new draft rules (and an Online Survey to get [...]
I’ve written several posts about how prescription painkillers kill more Arizonans than heroin and cocaine combined- but heroin is still the No. 1 killer among the illegal drugs. One hundred people died from a heroin overdose in AZ in 2013 (vs. about 1,000 from prescription drugs). Heroin is very addictive. According to NIDA, about 23% of people that try heroin will become [...]
