Mother’s Day and Women’s Health Week
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 employees May 14 & 15 at [...]
SARS déjà vu?
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 Emirates, the UK and France. [...]
SARS… A 10-Year Retrospective
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 scrambled to understand and contain [...]
Rulemaking Stuff
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). Our teams are now busy [...]
Home Baked Goods & Empowering Opportunity
Last year I blogged about a grant sponsored by the Arizona Developmental Disabilities Planning Council to help folks with developmental disabilities and their families become self-employed by starting their own cottage industry food business. At the end of last year, this funding was awarded to the Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center, which has developed a 10-week training course to [...]
State Employee Recognition
The work we do often doesn’t get a lot of fanfare. Much like police who respond to hundreds of calls a week, public health workers diligent work to protect the public from health threats – we just don’t respond with lights and sirens and there aren't any TV shows that celebrate our work. I try to keep you posted about [...]