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 [...]
Our Tobacco Prevention Program will be hitting targeted audiences (lower income Arizonans) a few days before New Years and during January with smoking cessation messages. There’s no better time to motivate folks to quit smoking than January because that’s the time of year when people generally set health goals for themselves. The ads (funded by [...]
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 [...]
A new report from the CDC this week showed that the smoking rate across the US has stayed flat at about 20% over the last 5 years. Not so in Arizona, where we’ve decreased from 20% in 2005 to 16% in 2009, according to our latest BRFS report. As is the case across the country, [...]
Our new advertising campaign that encourages people to call our Arizona Smokers’ Helpline is going great. The ads continue to bring in unprecedented call volumes to the ASHLine. Since the commercials began airing less than a month ago, we’ve gotten more than 8,100 calls- which is more than the ASHLine receives typically in a five-month [...]
Our Smoke Free Arizona team published our 3rd annual ADHS Smoke-Free Arizona Annual Report 2010 this week. The report found (just like last year) that compliance the law is excellent, thanks in large part to the common-sense approach that we took when implementing the act since 2007. Over the last year, the county health departments conducted [...]
Which city do you think is overall more fit and healthy, Phoenix or Pittsburgh. I won’t give you the answer, you’ll have to go to this year’s The ACSM American Fitness Index Report at http://www.americanfitnessindex.org/ to get the answer. They put this report out every year to help city planners, policy makers, health educators, and [...]
All this week, I'm talking about the five "winnable battles" in public health as laid out by the new CDC Director - Dr. Thomas Frieden. Dr. Frieden talked about focusing its strategic planning on public health and policy interventions to help win the 5 “Winnable Battles” in the next 3 years. There’s not much on [...]
Edit: Our agency does not provide free Nicotine Replacement Therapy. If you wish to receive this, please contact http://ashline.org or 1-888-55-66-222 We began running our new smoking cessation TV ad’s this month in targeted markets. They use a “call to action” format and encourage smokers to call a phone number (the ASHline http://www.ashline.org/ 1-800-55-66-222) [...]
Folks that face challenges with mental & behavioral health tend to smoke at a higher rate than others. That makes this group a high priority for interventions to reduce their smoking rates. Throughout 2010, we’ll be focusing on various intervention strategies for important health topics along these lines- and March is the final month of [...]
