The CDC released their grant guidance for the upcoming Community Transformation Grants a couple of weeks ago. The objective of the grant is to support the implementation (and evaluation) of evidence-based community preventive health activities to reduce chronic disease rates, prevent the development of secondary conditions, address health disparities, and develop a stronger evidence base [...]
Today is Don't Fry Day - a day established by the National Council on Skin Cancer Prevention to remind people of the importance of sunscreen. In Arizona, we need more than a day - it is more of a season and now that school’s just about out (or is), kids have more time on their [...]
Life expectancy improved by more than 30 years in the US during the 20th Century. Advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease have played a role, but the real reason we’re living longer today has a lot more to do with public health interventions than advances in health care. Interventions like vaccines, motor vehicle safety, [...]
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 [...]
I’ve written often over the last few weeks about our priority over the next couple of years to better integrate primary healthcare and psychiatric care in AZ, and that last week HHS approved the Health Homes Planning Grant which will focus on improving coordination of care and increasing access to primary care and prevention services, [...]
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 [...]
Michael Allison has set up a Tribal Consultation meeting regarding Medical Marijuana to get input and advice from our tribal partners on the new medical marijuana law. There are a whole host of questions to consider, everything from whether any tribes intend to adopt the new law and whether they would ever be interested in [...]
For some reason human nature drives us to fear unknown, strange, and seemingly unpredictable hazards more than the commonplace hazards that we face day to day, even though the everyday hazards are a far more important public health risk. Accidents and injuries are a good example. Accidents and injuries are hands-down the number 1 killer [...]
One of our objectives as we developed the final set of Rules for Medical Marijuana was to ensure reliable access to medication in rural Arizona. That's why we built in some incentives to encourage folks to apply for one of the rural CHAAs. First, we made sure that inventory could be transferred between dispensaries (and [...]
Many of the comments that we received at the public hearings were about how we'll evaluate and award the dispensary licenses. Many of the questions were about zoning, so here's a brief summary of how the zoning part will work: The final rules outline a 2-step process whereby applicants enter into a competitive screening in each Community Health Analysis Area [...]
