Annual Preparedness “Reportcard”
Every year a group called the Trust for America’s Health puts out a ‘Report Card” regarding what they believe is an assessment of each state’s readiness for a public health emergency. They use various measurements that they can find and grade each state against each other. The implication is that states that do poorly won’t be able to execute in [...]
New Year, New MEDSIS
Over the past two years, folks in ITS and Epidemiology and Disease Control have been working together to enhance our state’s electronic communicable disease surveillance system called MEDSIS. This week the new version of MEDSIS went live. Major enhancements include the integration of tuberculosis reporting, case management and surveillance; expanded case management capabilities for all diseases; and additional functionality to better [...]
Folic Acid Awareness Week
Taking a daily multivitamin can save babies lives by preventing birth defects. Folic acid is a B vitamin can prevent up to 70% of neural tube defects (including spina bifida and anencephaly). An average of 52 babies are born with neural tube defects in Arizona each year. The easiest way for women of childbearing age to get the needed 400 micrograms (mcg) [...]
Midwife Scope of Practice Draft Proposal
Our next Midwifery Scope of Practice Advisory Committee meeting will be Monday (January 14th) from 6-8 pm in the Lab conference room. The Agenda is packed with 2 full hours of information and discussion. We’ll be reviewing data from other states, and what scopes of practice they allow, as well as reviewing our own data collected from the midwives' quarterly reports along [...]
Influenza Going Gangbusters in US and AZ
During the 2009- 2010 influenza pandemic, we saw how influenza can be unpredictable in terms of who it affects most, when it occurs, and what strains will circulate. This season is no exception. While the circulating strains are exactly what we predicted, the peak of the flu season is hitting earlier than usual (now) and it's really spreading fast. In fact, [...]
Behavioral Health Annual Report
Our Behavioral Health Services team just finished and published our FY 12 Annual Report. The new report identifies the number of clients served by service area, funding category and program; and includes programmatic financial reports of revenues, expenditures and administrative costs. In it, you'll see that we received a total of about $1.46B in funding for FY 2012 for behavioral health services. Our Agency administrative costs were about 1% [...]