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Archive for: September 2012
Sep 28 2012

Emerging Bullying Concern: Kids with Food Allergies

Sep 28, 2012, 2:25 PM

As the school year gets firmly under way, the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) is reporting that 25 percent of food allergic children say they have been bullied because of their food allergy, and among those bullied 57 percent report being touched or harassed by children dangling a food allergen, such as peanuts, dairy and eggs.

“Food allergies are serious and shouldn’t be taken lightly in schools, especially when it comes to bullying,” said allergist Stanley Fineman, MD, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. “There is always the possibility of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that occurs suddenly, can worsen quickly and can cause death.”

A 2010 study published in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology found that 80 percent of food bullying incidents happens while at school. Food bullying can range from verbal teasing to forceful acts of making a student come in contact with an allergen.

The ACAAI says the bullying is especially concerning because the number of kids with a food allergy has doubled from 4 percent in 2010, to about 8 percent in 2012.  

The warning signs of food bullying are similar to other forms of bullying, according to the ACAAI:

  • Signs of depression and withdrawal
  • No desire or fear of going to school
  • Changes in eating habits and weight loss
  • Changes in behavior and sleep patterns
  • Bringing home a full lunchbox or not eating lunch at school

>>Bonus Link: Read a recent study from the American Journal of Public Health on cyber bullying, and read more on bullying prevention efforts.

This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF New Public Health blog.

Sep 28 2012

Nursing Education Isn't What It Used to Be!

Sep 28, 2012, 10:00 AM, Posted by Kate Driscoll Malliarakis

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Human Capital Blog is asking diverse experts: What is and isn’t working in health professions education today, and what changes are needed to prepare a high-functioning health and health care workforce that can meet the country’s current and emerging needs? Today’s post is by Kate Driscoll Malliarakis, PhD, CNP, MAC, assistant professor and program coordinator, Nursing Leadership and Management at the George Washington University School of Nursing. Malliarakis is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Executive Nurse Fellow (ENF) and president-elect of the RWJF ENF Alumni Association.

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Nursing has afforded me the opportunity to serve in numerous non-traditional positions. Now as an academic, I work to provide my students with a broad view of health care. Today, nurses enjoy a variety of educational opportunities that differ from the old one-size-fits-all approach. Thanks to technological advances in education, hybrid formats enable nurses to experience new educational opportunities through online course work and flexible, asynchronous learning.  

Online education encourages diversity as students hail from a variety of geographic locations and experiences. Unlike the standard classroom where a student can sit in the last row and not participate, online discussions demand the student’s involvement not only with the faculty but with each other. The result is a richer interaction and learning experience.

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Sep 26 2012

What Works For Health: A New Resource for Community Leaders

Sep 26, 2012, 12:02 PM

When it comes to solving problems that affect the health of our communities, knowing what works matters. Using programs, policies and innovations that are based on solid evidence offers a better chance to improve public health.

What Works for Health, the latest release from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, is an online, searchable menu of policies and programs—each with a rating based on strength of evidence for factors that can help make communities healthier places to live, learn, work and play. Policies, such as sobriety checkpoints, and programs, such as early childhood interventions, included in What Works for Health are rated on their level of evidence to help guide users toward choosing proven strategies. The County Health Rankings & Roadmaps team also hopes this tool will help spur a dialogue, and encourage those in the field to weigh in on other possible evidence-based programs.

NewPublicHealth spoke with Bridget Catlin, PhD, MHSA, director of the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps about the new tool and how she expects it to be used.

NewPublicHealth: Who is the primary audience for What Works for Health?

Bridget Catlin: There are a number of audiences for What Works for Health. Key audiences are people who are leading community health improvement planning processes such as public health officials. Hospitals are also getting involved in this area due to requirements from the ACA and from the IRS. They’re doing community health needs assessments to identify needs in communities and then what they can do to address those needs. Other audiences include employers who want to make their communities healthier for their employees and dependents, as well as grant-makers and policy-makers who are interested in spending their resources in areas that they know will work.

NPH: What’s new about this resource? How is it different from some of the other evidence guides that are out there like The Community Guide?

 

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Sep 25 2012

Study: High N.Y. Cigarette Taxes Help Cut Smoking Rates

Sep 25, 2012, 2:30 PM

New York’s high cigarette tax—the highest in the country, at $4.35 per pack—has helped the state cut smoking levels dramatically for both adults and high school students, according to a new study in PLoS One.

The state’s rate of adult smoking dropped by 28 percent from 2003 to 2010, while the national rate for the same period dropped only 11 percent. The rate for New York high school students dropped 38 percent from 2003 to 2011, compared to a national drop of 17 percent. There are approximately 664,000 adult smokers in New York.

While a clear contributor, a high cigarette tax is just one of the tactics that’s helped improve the state’s health, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. New York also has a comprehensive smoke-free air law, as well as prevention and cessation programs. Overall, these public health strategies have helped prevent more than 300,000 kids from smoking and saved approximately $11.6 billion in health care costs.

Despite the clear public health successes, Tobacco-Free Kids says more still needs to be done to help low-income New Yorkers quit smoking. While the study determined their smoking rate is also well below the national rate, 24.3 percent of New Yorkers earning less than $30,000 annually are smokers.

>> Read more on the study from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

>> Read more on how tobacco taxes can help cut health care costs.

 

This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF New Public Health blog.

Sep 25 2012

Investing in What Works: Recommended Reading

Sep 25, 2012, 1:41 PM

Investing in What Works

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is among several critical thinkers who have authored essays in a new book, Investing in What Works for America’s Communities. The book, a joint project of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Low Income Investment Fund, includes chapters on policy, finance and education, offers a hard and experienced look at what it will take to help build strong communities that support the opportunities for people to live healthy and productive lives.

In her essay, “Why Health, Poverty, and Community Development Are Inseparable,” Lavizzo-Mourey writes about the growing need for collaboration across disciplines to revitalize low-income communities and create opportunities to make choices that enable all people to live a long and healthy life, regardless of where they live. Read an excerpt:

In order to improve health in this country, the health sector must work closely with those who plan and build communities, especially the community development and finance organizations that work in low-income neighborhoods to build child care centers, schools, grocery stores, community health clinics, and affordable housing. From the health perspective, our interest is less about the buildings and more about what happens in them. Are the schools providing healthful food and eliminating empty-calorie snacks? Is there daily physical activity during and after school? Are grocery stores providing and promoting healthful foods? Are health clinics providing “prescriptions” of healthy lifestyles and services such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in addition to medications? Is affordable housing situated in proximity to safe places to play and be physically active? Is the neighborhood walkable, with well-lighted sidewalks that lead to public transportation, jobs, and services?

Other key essays in the new book include:

·         Fighting Poverty through Community Development—by Shaun Dovonan, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education; and Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. In their essay, the Secretaries call for the empowerment of federal, regional, and local officials with a wide range of responsibilities to break barriers, effectively meet community needs, and spark economic development.

·         America’s Tomorrow: Race, Place, and the Equity Agenda—by Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of the poverty action advocacy group PolicyLink. Blackwell argues that equity-driven policy change is essential to transforming poverty-driven communities into high-opportunity communities. She says this requires broad-based alliances across fields and an inclusive agenda that focuses on those left behind. This also means building public infrastructure, growing new businesses and jobs, and preparing workers for the jobs of tomorrow. 

·         Crime and Community Development—by Ingrid Gould Ellen, professor of urban planning and public policy at New York University. Ellen’s thesis is that public safety is an important element of community development both because people subjectively care about it, but also because crime objectively destroys the fabric of neighborhoods and heightens stress. She suggests three strategies: increasing collective efficacy (the willingness of residents to monitor public spaces and intervene when those spaces or their neighbors are threatened); reducing physical blight and disorder; and community courts, which often also house a variety of social service programs.

>>Bonus Links:

This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF New Public Health blog.

Sep 25 2012

Mount Sinai Creates Department of Family Medicine to Encourage Primary Care

Sep 25, 2012, 12:00 PM

Many elite medical schools — Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Yale, among them — have no departments of family medicine to train students who want to specialize in primary care. Students interested in that field are instead trained to take care of seriously ill patients and are sometimes even discouraged by professors if they do not pursue a specialty, NPR reports.

But Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York is making a “fundamental change” in its mission. Previously ranked among the bottom 20 medical schools in the country when it comes to the number of primary care doctors it graduates, Mount Sinai had neither a department nor any family physicians on staff until this June.

Now, thanks to a partnership with the Institute for Family Health, the school employs primary care doctors from the Institute’s community clinics to teach students during all four years of medical school, offering primary care students a chance to learn the skills they’ll need in practice.

"I want to spend my career keeping people healthy rather than trying to bring them back from a very serious illness," Mount Sinai student Demetri Blanas told NPR. "I think it is what society needs right now, and that is important to me."

Neil Calman, president and CEO of the Institute for Family Health, called the partnership “a natural marriage.”

"I think people are finally realizing that the country will be bankrupt if we continue to admit people and readmit people for conditions that could be prevented with good primary care," he told NPR.

Listen to the story on NPR.

This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF Human Capital Blog. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors.

Sep 25 2012

New on the Human Capital Section of the RWJF Website

Sep 25, 2012, 9:00 AM

The Human Capital section of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) website carries breaking news, profiles and features about the pioneering work and discoveries of scholars, fellows and grantees the Foundation supports. Check out a few of the latest stories:

RWJF Medical Scholar, the First African American to Head NHLBI, Discusses His Plans for the Agency
Gary H. Gibbons, MD, cardiologist and RWJF Medical Faculty Development Program Scholar, has been named director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Gibbons took the helm in August and will work with a budget of more than $3 billion to advance research in treatment and prevention of heart, lung, and blood diseases and sleep disorders. Gibbons discusses his goals for NHLBI, the third largest research organization at the National Institutes of Health.

Caught in the Gambling Zone: RWJF Health & Society Scholar Examines Modern Slot Devices, the ‘Machinery of Addiction’
Psychologists have long recognized gambling’s power to draw people into a cycle of dependence that can empty bank accounts and ruin lives. In her new book, RWJF Health & Society Scholar Natasha Dow Schüll, PhD, MA, describes how the gaming industry has tailored the experience of playing electronic gambling machines to lock players into a rhythm that blocks out everything else around them.

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Sep 24 2012

Transforming Nursing Education to Meet Emerging Health Care Needs

Sep 24, 2012, 9:00 AM

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Human Capital Blog is asking diverse experts: What is and isn’t working in health professions education today, and what changes are needed to prepare a high-functioning health and health care workforce that can meet the country’s current and emerging needs? Today’s post is by Judith Halstead, PhD, RN, FAAN, ANEF, president of the National League for Nursing and executive associate dean for Academic Affairs at the Indiana University School of Nursing.

The changes proposed by health care reform have the potential to significantly alter the environment in which nurses and other health care professionals will practice. The emerging emphasis on primary care, transition care, and accountable care organizations underscores a fundamental shift in how the US health care delivery system is envisioned to function in the future. This future health care environment is very different from the one that many of us in academia currently prepare our students to practice in, i.e., an environment that has been predominately focused on preparing students for practice in the acute care setting. The IOM’s Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health (2011) clearly identifies changes that need to occur in nursing education if we hope to prepare nurses with the competencies and skills required to practice in a redesigned health care system.

What is the role of nursing education in realizing a transformed health care system? The role can be a significant one, but only if we are willing to re-examine our current nursing education models.

To produce nurses prepared to practice in reformed health care environments, we can no longer educate our nursing students using the traditional educational practices that we have long embraced. There exists no substantive evidence to suggest that our traditional means of clinical education in nursing and other health professions are particularly effective in developing clinical reasoning, so it is an opportune time to closely examine our educational practices and create new learning paradigms that are grounded in evidence. I believe we need to focus on four priority areas in order to achieve meaningful transformation in our nursing education models: 1) building faculty capacity; 2) designing new models of clinical education; 3) developing innovative models of academic/practice collaboration; and 4) advancing the science of nursing education through research.

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Sep 21 2012

Prescription Drug Overdoses a Growing Public Health Problem

Sep 21, 2012, 11:00 AM

Deaths from prescription drug overdoses are an increasingly serious problem across the United States, according to the American Public Health Association’s Public Health Newswire, which reported on a related session at last week’s Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) Annual Meeting.

Poisoning deaths—89 percent of which are due to drug overdoses—are now a more deadly public health issue than even motor vehicle collisions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prescription drug abuse is a growing factor—in 2011 there were more deaths from prescription painkiller overdoses than there were from both heroin and cocaine.

“This has become…something that should have the attention of every single public health official in the country,” said Terry Cline, commissioner with the Oklahoma State Department of Health, at the ASTHO meeting in Austin, Texas.

The National Governors Association (NGA) is hosting a year-long prescription drug abuse initiative to help combat the epidemic. Between now and April 2013, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oregon and Virginia will:

  • Participate in two, two-day policy academy meetings
  • Participate in an in-state policy workshop
  • Receive targeted technical assistance from NGA Center staff and a national faculty of experts
  • Participate in networking activities
  • Receive a $45,000 subgrant to support related activities

>>Read more coverage of the ASTHO meeting. 

>>Read the release from the National Governor’s Association.

>>Read the full prescription drug overdose update from APHA’s Public Health Newswire.

This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF New Public Health blog.

Sep 20 2012

Report: "How Obesity Threatens America's Future"

Sep 20, 2012, 12:36 PM

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The number of obese adults, along with related disease rates and health care costs, are on course to increase dramatically in every state in the country over the next 20 years, according to F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2012, a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Trust for America's Health.

The report forecasts adult obesity rates in each state by 2030 and the likely resulting rise in obesity-related disease rates and health care costs.

If upward trends in obesity rates continue, obesity rates could exceed 60 percent in 13 states by 2030, and the loss in economic productivity for the country could be as high as $580 billion annually.

But the news isn't all bad---critical preventive measures could make an enormous impact, and help forge a healthier future for the nation. If states can cut the average body mass index of their population by just 5 percent, millions of Americans could be spared from serious health conditions and the country could save billions of dollars in health care spending. The interactive map pictured here paints a picture of two possible futures---one if we continue on our current path of rapidly rising obesity rates, and another if states can achieve a 5 percent reduction in BMI. 

>>Read the full report.

This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF New Public Health blog.