Bringing Primary Care to Rural AZ
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 J1 Visa Waiver Program) a [...]
Integrating Environmental Health & Prevention into Home Visiting
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 a new Healthy@Home assessment tool, gather [...]
Challenge Accepted – and Met
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 Arizona Perinatal Trust was recognized [...]
Disease Follows Conflict
Throughout human history, war and political unrest have been associated with the spread of disease, often called the “third army”. During the Napoleonic wars, 8 times more people in the British army died from disease than from battle wounds. In our Civil War, 66% of the 660,000 deaths among soldiers were caused by pneumonia, typhoid, dysentery, and malaria. Up to [...]
Behavioral Health Quality Service Review
Objective evaluation is critical to assessing and improving the performance of any public health system- including the behavioral health system that we manage. One of the ways we assess our behavioral health system is to conduct a “Quality Services Review”, which identifies strengths, service capacity gaps, and areas for improvement at a system-wide level. A couple of weeks ago a [...]
UA to Offer MPH in Health Services Administration
To help meet the growing demand for health care administrators the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the U of A (in Phoenix) will begin offering a new accredited Master of Public Health in Health Services Administration program in fall 2014. The health services administration program will provide students with the knowledge of how health care services [...]