Aksel Laudon, a 6th-grade student at Kyrene Centennial Middle School in Phoenix, is this year’s “Be SunWise and Play Sun Smart” poster-drawing contest winner. Aksel’s drawing was selected by the Arizona Diamondbacks from more than 7,000 student poster entries. Aksel and his teacher Jeffrey Garrett, and their families will be celebrated at the June 5 DBacks game in a pre-game award ceremony on [...]
Our Arizona Cancer Registry scored a coveted Gold rating from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) this week for having complete and accurate data suitable for calculating complete and accurate incidence statistics. We’ve received Silver ratings for the last several years- but this year we got the Gold for our increased its data completeness [...]
There’s an old tale about a Texas “Sharpshooter” that pulls his pistol out of his holster and shoots at the broad side of a barn pretty much at random without aiming. Then he goes up to the barn with a paintbrush and draws a circle around the bullet holes and says: “See, I have perfect [...]
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts- we’re in the beginning phases of overhauling our regulations for licensing behavioral health facilities. This’ll be a long process- and the finish line is in mid-2013. We’re starting with a set of what we’ll call “straw-man” language that we can use as a way to start the discussions. We’ve [...]
It’s hard to believe- but our Smoke Free Arizona program turned 5 this month. Voters approved the Act back in November of ’06 by a few percentage points. The Initiative language gave us a super-short turn-around time (just like medical marijuana)… and we turned the key on the program by May of ’07. Implementation of the [...]
People get hurt because of unsafe acts and unsafe conditions. It’s always easier to deal with unsafe conditions- because you can often make a system change and have an impact. Changing unsafe acts (behaviors) is a lot harder. Anyway- a new report came out this week called The Facts Hurt: A State by State Injury [...]
It’s been a busy week for our medical marijuana team. Our 2-week dispensary application period ended a couple of hours ago… as did the hearing regarding adding new debilitating medical conditions. We received 484 dispensary applications over the last 2 weeks. As you know, we have 126 Community Health Analysis Areas (CHAAs) and a maximum [...]
About 500,000 times a year in Arizona a call goes out from someone that finds themselves in a medical crisis. Our pre-hospital and hospital providers step up to the plate to answer that call. All Arizonans are proud and appreciative of what you do for our citizens, friends, co-workers and families. You make a difference! [...]
Friday afternoon we’re holding a public comment session about whether or not to add four new debilitating conditions to the medical marijuana program. The comments should center on scientific studies done on how marijuana affects Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Migraines, Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. We're looking for peer-reviewed, published studies that show the benefit or the [...]
The First Lady’s Let’s Move! Child Care initiative recognized our Empower program for exceptional work to promote young children’s health and prevent childhood obesity in the early care and education setting last week. We were selected for recognition for carrying out exceptional work to promote and implement the goals of Let’s Move! Child Care, including using [...]
