I’m sure you know that a few wildfires are still burning in AZ, including the massive Wallow fire. The Governor signed a Declaration of Emergency on Monday this week, releasing some state funds to help with the response efforts and opening the State Emergency Operations Center, which is coordinating and directing the state emergency response activities. You [...]
Our Tobacco and Chronic Disease program will win 4 of the coveted International Association of Business Communicators Phoenix Copper Quill Awards this week. The awards are given annually to outstanding marketing and communications efforts, as judged by communications professionals around the US and Internationally. This year we’ll be getting awards for: Our Venomocity website and social media [...]
The Legislature completed the Regular Session a couple of weeks ago, and Monday marked the deadline for the Governor to make her decision about each bill that came to her desk: sign the bill into law, veto the bill, or do nothing and let the bill become law. Last week I summarized the new laws [...]
We’re finished making our policy decisions regarding the final medical marijuana rules, and our rules team will be spending Friday and probably part of the weekend crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s on the final medical marijuana rules. We’ll be releasing them on our website first-thing on Monday morning. We’ll also be having a [...]
HHS launched a new web portal providing important health and health care indicator data. The Health Indicators Warehouse represents a vast collection of health and health care indicators like determinants of health, health care access, cost, quality, and use. Health indicator can be searched for specific populations, places, political jurisdictions, and geographic areas. The Warehouse [...]
As I mentioned in my blog last Friday computer models developed by the international community and the federal government suggested that very low levels of radiation were crossing the Pacific Ocean late last week and that there could be very small increases in natural radiation in North America including Arizona this week. All the models [...]
The National Alliance on Mental Illness released a report this month that included policy recommendations for states to consider including educating the public, families and peers about mental illness and incorporating behavioral health screening into primary care. The good news is that we’re on the mark here in Arizona as we’ve already begun to implement [...]
It’s always best to lead by example. We’ve been encouraging community gardens for years and now we have one! After much hoping, dreaming and planning the community garden is finally a reality. In October, Jonathan Manning from Elgin Nursery came out to help us break ground. We added compost and cottonseed meal to a long [...]
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 [...]
Respiratory syncytial virus (or RSV) is another respiratory infection that mainly affects little kids and circulates every year. It occurs in the winter, like flu, but flu and RSV usually don’t peak at the same time. Since our flu season is early this year, it looks like our RSV season may be a little later [...]
