Tobacco Cessation Among Folks with a Mental Illness
For the past 18 months our tobacco cessation and behavioral health teams have been working together in a way that is positioning Arizona as a national leader in closing the gap in life expectancy for people with a mental illness! Consider these startling facts which confront Arizonans with a mental illness: Life expectancy is 30 years less than the population [...]
School Health Revolution
The Arizona Department of Health Services is partnering with the Arizona Department of Education to help schools make health a priority. Arizona has the 15th highest childhood obesity rate in the nation. By creating healthier places to learn, schools are part of the solution to the childhood obesity epidemic. One of the most effective ways to create healthy school environments [...]
Don’t Miss Your Last Chance to Comment on Arizona’s Draft Medical Marijuana Rules
Three cheers for our interdisciplinary team that’s been working hard on the latest round of Administrative Code to implement the new medical marijuana law that will take effect April 14. We changed lots of provisions since the latest draft that we released on January 31. Here are just a few highlights: The new draft rules would boost the requirements for [...]
Nutrition & the Retail Gorilla
You know how when California passes a new car emission standard or something all the manufacturers comply with all of their fleet even though they don’t sell them all in CA? That’s because the car makers can’t afford to miss out on the California market. Well, Walmart is kinda like that when it comes to retail food. A food processor [...]
AZ’s New Substance Abuse Annual Report
Our Behavioral Health team polished off this year’s 2010 Annual Substance Abuse Report to the Legislature and Governor on December 30, 2010. A few highlights include: We began statewide implementation of the American Society of Addiction Medicine Placement Patient Criteria. Once fully adopted, this process will be the uniform criteria for assessing a client’s addiction severity and determining the most [...]
2011 Homeless Street Count
Twenty-two employees from ADHS and members of their families teamed up last week and joined the national effort to rid the nation and our state of homelessness. The beginning step is to produce clear evidence of the need by providing the government of (as closely as we can) the actual number of people who are homeless and the services they [...]