Mental Health First Aid Hits National Stage
Mental Health First Aid reached the national stage this week in the Presidents message. This week’s Now is the Time document developed by the Fed’s advocates expanding Mental Health First Aid Training for teachers and adults who work with kids. The proposal also includes funding to help identified children and teens find treatment if they need it. Mental Health [...]
Selling Food
Food marketing to children and teens is a major public health concern. Earlier this year, the Walt Disney Company announced it will no longer accept advertisements for junk food on its child-directed television, radio, and online sites. Disney also updated its nutrition standards for foods that can be advertised to children. The food and beverage industry spends $2 billion per [...]
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 [...]