Medical Marijuana will be implemented in April, 2011. The coordination of tasks to ensure smooth and efficient implementation is a huge goal for 2011 and cuts across Bureau lines, involving many distinct portions of not only Public Health Preparedness but the Agency as a whole. Emergency Medical Services Within the Bureau of Emergency Services and [...]
Our Tobacco Prevention Program will be hitting targeted audiences (lower income Arizonans) a few days before New Years and during January with smoking cessation messages. There’s no better time to motivate folks to quit smoking than January because that’s the time of year when people generally set health goals for themselves. The ads (funded by [...]
The new Phoenix-Collaborative MPH in Public Health Practice program as well as a distance learning Graduate Certificate in Public Health are two great options for individuals looking to advance their knowledge about public health. The Master of Public Health in Public Health Practice is a new interdisciplinary program that prepares students to develop the public [...]
The US Department of Health and Human Services is in line to receive $11 Billion in funding over the next 5 years for the operation, expansion and construction of health centers nationwide. These funds will be made available through a nationwide competitive grant application process. Our Bureau of Health Systems Development is the Arizona designated [...]
The name of the game for Public Health Prevention in 2011 is integration and leverage. Our Public Health Prevention Team will be focusing on the social determinants of health and working to implement policies, systems and environmental changes that make the healthy choices easy. Here are some examples of our public health prevention priorities for the [...]
Arizona uses a Certificate of Necessity (CON) system to regulate ground ambulance service in Arizona- and to make sure that every place in the State has adequate emergency medical services, including the frontier parts of AZ. The CON actually describes the geographic service area, level of service (advanced life support or basic life support), hours of operation, response [...]
Every year that goes by brings more solid information suggesting that the body mass index (BMI) may become the future leading health indicator. If you’re wondering what BMI is; it’s your weight in kilograms (Kg) divided by the square of your height in meters (m2). There’s solid evidence that BMIs in the upper 20s and [...]
In a post last Summer, I mentioned that our state public health laboratory Environmental & Analytical Chemistry unit has been selected as 1 of 8 chemistry laboratories across the country that would be examining commercial seafood for contaminants from the gusher in the Gulf. The goal was to find out whether commercial seafood has been [...]
We’ve got an exiting year in store for the Arizona State Hospital in 2011. One of the highlights will be our New Forensic Hospital which will open in the Fall. During 2010 our Forensic team reorganized their treatment groups to focus on both psychiatric symptom stability and pro-social skill development and engagement. During 2011 we’ll [...]
A few years ago it became pretty clear that we were facing some budget reductions. At the time, we had no idea that our budget reductions would be as extensive as they turned out to be. However, we did know that if we were going to maintain our laboratory capacity to protect the folks of [...]
