ADHS & UA Score New Traumatic Brain Injury Grant
Approximately 20,000 folks are seen in the AZ emergency departments for a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Of these 1,000 die and 4,500 are hospitalized. At least 2% of the U.S. population has a TBI-related long-term need for help to perform activities of daily living. So, needless to say, brain injury is a major public health issue. There’s growing evidence that the management of [...]
What’s Procure AZ?
We began working over 2 years ago with the State Procurement Office to initiate a statewide e-procurement system called Procure AZ. The goal of the statewide system is transparency of all procurement actions, cost reductions, and a more efficient use of time and resources by reducing purchasing timelines. We started using the new system on last July and to date [...]
Handwashing Report
A recent report in Surgery News found that a six-month "process improvement project" that added a simple hand-washing question to the daily ICU checklist decreased the rate of central line-associated bloodstream infections in a surgical ICU.
Arizona Peer and Family Coalition
Congrats to the Arizona Peer and Family Coalition for rolling out their new user friendly website last week. The Coalition is a group of people from AZ’s behavioral health community, including peers, family members, government representatives, and providers. Their mission is to advocate for statewide behavioral Health policy development by peers and family members. Their goal is to make a [...]
AZ Trauma System News
Trauma remains a big problem in Arizona; it’s the leading cause of death for folks under 44 and nearly 27,000 people suffered injuries severe enough to be cared for in trauma centers in 2009. We’ve been working hard over the last few years to recruit new rural hospitals into the trauma system as Level IV trauma hospitals (see my previous [...]
Global Polio Eradication Rounds the Bend
Public health efforts eradicated smallpox from the globe in the late 1970s. The last naturally occurring case was in Somalia in 1977 (followed by a couple of lab accident cases in 1978). Public health set its sites on Polio next- with an expectation that it could be eradicated before the turn of the century. A series of naturally occurring and [...]