Guest blog by Jessica Rigler, Bureau of Epidemiology and Disease Control 11th Annual Valley Fever Awareness Week Valley Fever is a lung infection caused a fungus in the soil here in Arizona. People get it by breathing in Valley Fever spores in the air. Most people will have no symptoms or recover after a few [...]
A Complaint was filed against the ADHS and others last week. It’s called a “Request for Declaratory Judgment and Permanent and Preliminary Injunction”. It basically asks the Court to declare that: 1) extracts and resins from the marijuana plant are protected in the definition of “Useable Marijuana” under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act; and 2) dispensaries, patients, caregivers, [...]
Our Vital Health Statistics team along with our partners at the UA College of Public Health completed our Year 2 Annual Report for the Arizona Medical Marijuana Program last week. You’ll find a wide range of information in the report including data about the demographics and kinds and qualifying conditions of our cardholders, geographic distribution [...]
Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in Arizona. Most of the new diagnoses of the disease are late stage. Discovery in late stage reduces the chance of survival. There’s really no reason for people to die from it – research shows colonoscopies that find polyps can dramatically reduce the chance of [...]
One of the things I’m most proud of over the last 5 years has been the way we successfully overhauled our regulation licensed healthcare institutions in AZ. Very few government entities could have accomplished such an all-encompassing regulatory reform effort that creates a new outcome-based system that will improve public health- while maintaining support from the [...]
Poisoning (including alcohol and prescription drugs) causes more deaths than car crashes in AZ. Committed folks across the state are taking action on this issue. We’re part of the Arizona Prescription Drug Misuse and Abuse Initiative, a multi-agency, multi-systemic approach to addressing the epidemic. As part of this initiative, new guidelines have been issued for prescribing [...]
Over the past month we have been looking at some different ways to measure and describe how a trauma system is performing. In the world of performance improvement the general belief is that you have to look at a number of different measures in order to be able to describe how the system is performing. [...]
Getting enough primary care providers into rural areas is a struggle everywhere- and AZ is no exception. Each state needs to have a coordinated and creative strategy to the get these critical access to care resources to the right places. We have a few strategies. One is the J1 Visa Program. Each year, we provide (through the [...]
This month we wrapped up an 18-month quality improvement pilot project to better integrate environmental health and chronic disease information and referrals into our state home visiting programs. A cross-divisional team made up of folks from Women's & Children's Health, environmental Health, chronic disease, workforce development, and performance management worked together to standardize and pilot [...]
We did it… and by we, I mean ADHS and partners around the state. We accepted the Association of Territorial and State Health Officers (ASTHO) challenge to reduce the rate of babies born too early by 8% by 2014. On Friday, ADHS and the March of Dimes Arizona Chapter received the Virginia Apgar award. The [...]
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