Our ADHS Communities Putting Prevention to Work Program was highlighted at a national CDC conference this month with over 1,000 attendees from states, territories, communities and tribes. Our team presented on the Arizona Baby Steps for Breastfeeding Success that’s working with 31 Arizona Perinatal Trust certified hospitals to develop institutional changes in maternity care practices [...]
This month AHCCCS told us that they’ve picked our Bureau of Tobacco & Chronic Disease as the state applicant for HHS’ Medicaid Incentives for Prevention of Chronic Diseases Grant. The grant proposal (which will be developed with AHCCCS) must be turned in to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services early next month. The grant [...]
Our Bureau of Nutrition and Physical Activity just completed a series of free cooking-based nutrition trainings for childcare providers in Arizona. The Cooking Matters curriculum from Share our Strength, as part of the Wal-Mart Foundation Health Initiatives, gives childcare providers the opportunity to learn how to prepare healthy meals and snacks on a limited budget and [...]
The name of the game for Public Health Prevention in 2011 is integration and leverage. Our Public Health Prevention Team will be focusing on the social determinants of health and working to implement policies, systems and environmental changes that make the healthy choices easy. Here are some examples of our public health prevention priorities for the [...]
Every year that goes by brings more solid information suggesting that the body mass index (BMI) may become the future leading health indicator. If you’re wondering what BMI is; it’s your weight in kilograms (Kg) divided by the square of your height in meters (m2). There’s solid evidence that BMIs in the upper 20s and [...]
Everyone knows that physical activity is good for kids, actually its good for everyone. However, partly because of the increasing pressure to include more academic work in the classroom, most kids aren’t getting the recommended levels of physical activity at school. Now, there’s growing evidence that physical activity and academic achievement go hand in hand. A [...]
The new child care center standards went into effect last week. Check out our newly revamped child care licensing website, which has the latest for parents, consumers, childcare operators and others. Our Licensing, rules, and all the other ADHS experts who contributed to the new rules and did a fantastic job. Our success was directly [...]
Beginning October 1, Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System will automatically enroll all Acute Care members into their local Regional Behavioral Health Authority (RBHA) or Tribal RBHA (T/RBHA). The plan eliminates the need for a separate administrative enrollment with the T/RBHA (and the associated paperwork) and streamlines the delivery of services, better integrate physical & behavioral health care. [...]
You probably think I sound like a broken record because I’m always writing about obesity… but it really is the dominant public health issue of our time. Last week, the CDC released its latest Vital Signs report called "State-Specific Obesity Prevalence Among Adults – United States, 2009,"… which finds that nine states had an obesity [...]
The Trust for America’s Health released their annual obesity report. Overall, the national trend toward increasing obesity rates continued it’s march forward. Arizona ranked in the middle of the pack, but the pack itself in increasingly unhealthy. More than two-thirds of states have adult obesity rates above 25 percent. In 1991, no state had an [...]
