It took longer than usual- but Influenza is finally circulating in AZ- and we’ve moved to the “Regional” flu category now (Regional is sort of the middle of the scale). The circulating strains in AZ (confirmed by our lab) are covered by this year’s vaccine- mostly our old friend the 2009 H1N1 virus and the familiar H3N2 [...]
We had the pleasure of meeting with a delegation of health officials from the Republic of Korea (South Korea) this week to talk about Arizona’s Trauma System. The Director General of Public Health policy (Byung Guk Yang, MD) and his team met with our Emergency Medical Services and Trauma System team to talk about how we [...]
I had the delightful experience of meeting with our former Director, Jack Dillenberg, at our AZ Developmental Disabilities Planning Council meeting last month. Our Council meeting was out at AT Still University’s AZ School of Dentistry & Oral Health. It was great seeing Jack again- he hasn't changed a bit- he's just as enthusiastic and animated as ever. Most of [...]
Public Health’s 10 Essential Services Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture - what is public health? Public health is everywhere and is a part of the infrastructure that keeps our communities safe and healthy and focuses on the entire populations while other models may focus on the individual. In the 1900s [...]
This week is National Folic Acid Awareness Week and a great time to start taking a multivitamin with 400 micrograms (mcg) of folic acid every day. So, whether or not you’re planning to have a baby this year, you can start the New Year with healthy habits that will help give a baby a healthy start [...]
I’m proud of a ton of things that we’ve accomplished for the folks of Arizona over the last 2 ½ years together. Two of the things that I’m most proud of has been our collective ability to think clearly about ways that we can achieve better health outcomes in Arizona using creative thinking, enthusiasm and [...]
For the past 16 months, our folks in the Division of Behavioral health and our Bureau of Tobacco and Chronic Disease and ASHline have been working to train clinical behavioral health staff in Maricopa and Pima Counties on how to get folks into smoking cessation (quit) services. The overall goal of this collaboration was to establish [...]
We've had to make lots of difficult decisions in response to the ongoing funding shortfalls in our behavioral health system (as well as everywhere in state government). Many decisions (while painful in the short term) have been necessary to maintain long term system stability as Arizona continues to emerge from this unprecedented fiscal crisis. While [...]
A few weeks ago I blogged about the June plenary session of the Arizona Mexico Commission called Arizona & Sonora: Gateway for Innovation. The conference provided an opportunity to move forward a bi-national agenda supported by Arizona and Sonora. The health committee discussed regional approaches to valley fever surveillance, burn patient infrastructure, substance abuse, TB, border [...]
Part of the authorizing statute for our tobacco prevention programs includes a requirement that we develop a bi-annual report of our progress and activities. Just two years ago, we reported that we were shifting to an “evidence-based” approach to our prevention activities. In other words- we shifted our intervention strategies to focus on approaches that have [...]
