Adoption of a model statute could help strengthen injury prevention explains Mel Kohn MD MPH, Public Health Director, Oregon Health Authority, in his Critical Opportunities presentation.
Congenital heart defects cause nearly one-quarter of deaths due to birth defects in infants. Nearly 5,000 babies are born each year with seven specific Critical Congenital Heart Defects or Critical Congenital Heart Disease (CCHD). There is a low-cost, non-invasive screening procedure, called pulse oximetry, that is effective in detecting CCHD. By making this screening mandatory, CCHD could be detected early and follow-ups could be done to improve health.
Legally requiring all public health departments to be accredited would improve their performance and accountability while promoting community collaboration, according to this Critical Opportunities presentation by Georgia Heise, DrPH, Public Health Director of the Three Rivers District Health Department.
In this Critical Opportunity, Tamar Klaiman, PhD, MPH, suggests that providers should be required to offer pertussis vaccination prior to new parents leaving the hospital/birth center with a newborn.
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice
Soraya Ghebleh suggests that by making non-medical exemptions for childhood vaccines more difficult to obtain, rates of childhood diseases like pertussis would be less of a threat.
In this Critical Opportunities presentation Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, makes the case that raising the tobacco purchasing age to 21 would aid in reducing minors' tobacco use by 50 percent, which would prevent 10 million people from becoming daily smokers and avoid 3 million premature deaths.
Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania
Scott Burris, JD •
Center for Public Health Law Research
This paper presents a three-step process for developing legal interventions as well as observations and suggestions for how to think about legal innovation within the broader campaign for evidenced-based policy.
Medical marijuana laws have been suggested as a possible cause of increases in marijuana use among adolescents in the United States. The study results suggest that, in the states assessed (Montana, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Delaware), medical marijuana laws have not measurably affected adolescent marijuana use in the first few years after their enactment. Longer-term results, after medical marijuana laws are more fully implemented, might be different.
This study was conducted with high school football and girls’ soccer athletes playing in fall 2012 and their coaches and parents in 20 urban or rural high schools in Washington State. Sixty-nine percent of concussed athletes reported playing with symptoms, and 40 percent reported that their coach was not aware of their concussion.
This research note explores complications with standard methods to evaluate place-based policing interventions. It identifies and explains issues of boundary misspecification during evaluation as a result of boundary adjustment by police during an intervention.