The behavioral health system transformation that we’re working on as part of the Maricopa County behavioral health services contract will go a long way toward better integrating primary and acute care and behavioral healthcare for folks with a serious mental illness. But… our success is also dependent on our regulatory reform within our Licensing shop. In fact, [...]
Every year each of the folks in my job around the country (called the State Health Officers) get together and elect a President of our association (called the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials or ASTHO). Each President picks a public health challenge during his or her term. This year’s ASTHO President is Dr. [...]
One of the missing ingredients in medical marijuana has been peer-reviewed science- but there is some out there. Studies are happening across the country to see how marijuana impacts and interacts with other drugs. One small-scale study done by UC San Francisco recently suggests using marijuana with opiates allowed some patients to reduce the amount of opiates needed to [...]
The Personnel Reform bill made some headway this week in the State Legislature. It’s a complicated bill and hasn't been through the full process yet- but I know there’s a lot of interest in it around these parts- so I’ll try to distill the current version down a little bit for our agency. Basically, if [...]
Here's a short story about using the democratic process to get things done. Some of you might remember a protest last December in front of our 150 Building. About 100 folks or so were carrying placards in front of our building asking us to make it easier to have a home-birth in AZ. Many of you probably [...]
A team of Aussie scientists from the U of New South Wales believe that a new kind of Whooping Cough bacteria (Bordetella pertussis) has slipped past the protective effects from the current “acellular” vaccine- contributing to an increase in cases being found Down Under. Their study was published this week in the latest The Journal of Infectious [...]
We had a productive “Request For Information (RFI)” session this week regarding our ”Recovery Through Whole Health, the Regional Behavioral Health Authority with Health Homes” project. About 150 folks attended the session- including potential bidders, members of the behavioral health provider community and peers and family members. We’ll be using the information from the session [...]
We’ve had plans to change how we think about security at the Hospital for the last several months. Our careful planning and organizing is paying off- as we’ve implemented many of our plans already and are turning the key on other reforms in the coming weeks and months. It’s definitely been a busy place at [...]
Cara Christ, MD and her team put together a dynamite new PowerPoint presentation on the role of AZ physicians under AZ’s Medical Marijuana Act. The goal of the presentation is to provide a resource for physicians to be better informed about their role under the Act- and to learn about the checks and balances that we [...]
This week marks the 50th anniversary of National Poison Prevention Week. For the first time ever- poisoning surpassed car crashes as the number one cause of injury deaths in AZ and more than 2,000 kids had to go to emergency rooms last year from unintentional poisoning. Kids under 5 had the highest rates of non-fatal emergency department visits from poisoning. For more [...]
