Did you know that according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration more than twice as many children are killed in pedestrian/vehicle incidents on Halloween compared to other days throughout the year? So this Halloween, take a minute and review some simple safety tips with your children. Children love Halloween time, so be sure to assure safety for everyone [...]
Prescription drugs can be safe and effective at treating illnesses- but leftovers are also tempting for experimental teens- and the misuse of narcotic prescriptions is an increasingly urgent public health problem in Arizona. In fact, more than 1,100 Arizonans died from prescription drug poisoning from misuse and abuse last year- which is more than the number [...]
You can think of the border public health advocacy network as a binational matrix of public health partners that collaborate to improve conditions along the US-Mexico border. The network includes national organizations like the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission along with state based partnerships like the Arizona-Mexico Commission and the annual U.S.-Mexico Border Governor’s Conference. Community based binational partnerships [...]
I was fortunate to be able to attend parts of this year’s conference of state health officers in Portland. Each year the folks in my job get together with the CDC and other federal partners and public health support organizations to strategize about the coming year’s national public health priorities and share best practices and resources. The [...]
This year’s theme for Primary Care Week is “Innovations in Primary Care”, focusing on ways health systems can reinvent their practices to promote continuous, comprehensive, and coordinated health care for their patients. Community Health Centers are models of comprehensive primary care, delivering these services in medically under-served areas to persons of all ages regardless of [...]
Our Women’s and Children’s Health team will be hosting a conference in Phoenix titled “Girls and Women’s Health across the Lifespan.” on Tuesday, November 8. The conference features the Life Course Perspective. The conference agenda is packed full of sessions that outline evidence-based tools and strategies for professional public health folks to build their inventory of [...]
Making good decisions about prioritizing which public health issues to tackle and how to target our interventions rests on our ability to collect and analyze public health data. For infectious disease surveillance that means have a base of solid reporting and surveillance so we can analyze infectious disease trends. For chronic diseases, we need to [...]
Most likely, family and friends are the lynchpins of your support system. The same is (of course) true for the patients that we serve at the Arizona State Hospital - and encouraging and reinforcing interaction with family and friends is a key to Recovery. An important element in reinforcing family and friend support systems is [...]
As you’ve probably heard over the past couple weeks, we are preparing for our big exercise on Nov. 4. The exercise scenario will prompt public health departments to make decisions about evacuation and sheltering in place. There are lots of factors that come into play when making these decisions. In some situations it may be [...]
Those of you in Licensing have heard me talk about the difference between compliance and enforcement more than once, but it's been awhile since I've written about the subject. Some people are confused about the distinction I always make between compliance and enforcement. They are 2 very different things. Compliance (as it relates to our licensees) [...]
