National Recreational Water Illness and Injury Prevention Week is coming up next week. Healthy swimming depends on paying attention to basic health, hygiene, sun-safety, and what swimmers bring into the pool (and what they don’t). For starters, remind your kids to take a sunscreen, hydration, and bathroom break every hour when swimming. You might also want to start [...]
We already broke the 100 degree mark in the Valley this week. It won’t be long before the heat’s here to stay. Heat is one of the most dangerous weather situations in public health – actually it’s the #1 weather-related killer. Last year 152 Arizonans died from heat exposure.... with 80% happening in June, July and August. The largest [...]
I’ve been writing quite a bit about population health and the importance of creating healthy environments for communities. Some of those innovations take creativity and cash to make them work. Help is on the way - today, the feds announced the Healthcare Innovation Awards – Round 2. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services put [...]
Now that Cory Nelson has officially been appointed as our Deputy Director for Behavioral Health, we’re moving full steam ahead to recruit for the Chief Executive Officer of the Arizona State Hospital. The CEO is a critical member of our team and has the responsibility of managing the day-to-day operations of the civil, forensic and [...]
Over the last few weeks, I’ve written about how a city’s General Plan is one tool for communities to define how they want their city or town to grow and improve population health and how city planning can have a real impact. I wrote about how community residents can use a recently developed Toolkit put [...]
Minority populations often have poorer health outcomes than non-minority populations… but our new Power Me A2Z is doing something to change that. Power Me A2Z empowers women to take steps to promote good health for their families and their future children. It offers women a free 90-day supply of vitamins with folic acid and tools to help [...]
Mother’s Day kicks off this year’s National Women’s Health Week with the theme “It’s Your Time.” This year’s celebration centers around how women take care of other people—their children, spouses, family, friends, and co-workers—but also need to take the time to care for themselves. We’re hosting the 4th annual Women’s Health Week Celebration for state [...]
Last month the World Health Organization (WHO) began to receive reports of human cases with SARS-like infections caused by a new coronavirus. According to WHO, 30 cases of this new illness have been found and 60% of the infections have been fatal. So far, the cases have been limited to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab [...]
This Spring marks 10 years since Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) arrived on the global public health scene. It started as a mystery illness in SE Asia- without name, origin, or cure in February of 2003. The CDC immediately began working with the World Health Organization to investigate the outbreak. Public health scientists across the globe [...]
Our Licensing and Rulemaking teams spent the last week of April with hundreds of Stakeholders from numerous associations and licensees about our ongoing regulatory reform effort. In addition, we’ve received hundreds of comments regarding our draft rules for Healthcare Institutions and Behavioral Health Service Agencies on our website (the comment period ended on May 5). [...]
