Troubled Teens: At Risk and Not Overlooked
Our Vision at the Arizona Department of Health Services is ”Health and Wellness for all Arizonans”. Part of that Vision for folks living with behavioral health issues or a mental illness means achieving and maintaining self-reliance and independence. To get there, some individuals simply need outpatient services occasionally. Some need wrap-around community or home-based services. Others need more intensive treatment [...]
Hearing and Vision Screening
According to the CDC about 15% of school age kids have some hearing loss. Children who are hard of hearing will find it harder to learn vocabulary, grammar, word order, and other parts of verbal communication. Newborn hearing loss occurs in about 1 in 5,000 births- which is why it’s so important that AZ kids get a newborn hearing screening [...]
Preventing Hospital Associated Infections in AZ: New Performance Data
A new CDC report released this week gave a status update on the national Winnable Battle to reduce hospital associated infections. Not all medical procedures carry the same risk of infection, so the report uses something called a standardized infection ratio to compare infection rates among hospitals. It’s a complicated statistic, but basically, it divides the number of infections that [...]
Blessing Bag Update
I wanted to update on one of my December blog posts. Around the holidays, patients at the Arizona State Hospital decided to take on a project – to help the homeless. Patients wanted an opportunity to give back to the community in a way that would help those in need. They chose a project working with the Phoenix Rescue Mission [...]
Show Your Love
Valentine’s Day isn’t just a day of romance, flowers and candy. The CDC Preconception Health and Health Care Initiative launched a campaign asking all women of childbearing age to Show Your Love by taking good care of themselves. It’s a national initiative to educate women and couples on the importance of preconception health. Preconception health refers to a woman’s health [...]
Our Most Popular ADHS Website
Guess which one of our ADHS Websites consistently has the most hits. Our influenza pages during flu season? Medical marijuana during our rulemaking? Questions about WIC eligibility? Nope. It’s our Genealogy website. The site has had more than 5,100,000 queries in the last 2 years. Our Vital Records team has been keeping data on birth and death certificates since 1855. A few [...]