Introduction: In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded 50 communities to participate in the Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) program. CPPW supported community-based approaches to prevent or delay chronic disease and promote wellness by reducing tobacco use and obesity. We collected the direct costs of CPPW for the 44 communities funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and analyzed costs per person reached for all CPPW interventions and by intervention category.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPopulation-level interventions focused on policy, systems, and environmental change strategies are increasingly being used to affect and improve the health of populations. At the same time, emphasis on implementing evidence-based public health practices and programming is increasing, particularly at the federal level. Valuing strategies in the population health domain without the benefit of demonstrated efficacy through highly rigorous methods introduces an inherent tension between planning and acting on the best evidence available, waiting for more rigorous evidence to emerge, as well as exploring innovative ways to evaluate and model evidence-based strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Community-based programs require substantial investments of resources; however, evaluations of these programs usually lack analyses of program costs. Costs of community-based programs reported in previous literature are limited and have been estimated retrospectively.
Purpose: To describe a prospective cost data collection approach developed for the Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) program capturing costs for community-based tobacco use and obesity prevention strategies.
Text4baby is the first free national health text messaging service in the United States that aims to provide timely information to pregnant women and new mothers to help them improve their health and the health of their babies. Here we describe the development of the text messages and the large public-private partnership that led to the national launch of the service in 2010. Promotion at the local, state, and national levels produced rapid uptake across the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Many youth with special health care needs have difficulties transferring to adult medical care. To address this, the Maternal and Child Health Bureau has made receipt of transition services a core performance outcome for community-based systems of care for youth with special health care needs. In this article we describe the results for the transition core outcome from the 2005-2006 National Survey of Children With Special Health Care Needs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States has increased dramatically in recent years, doubling in the last 20 years, and is expected to result in a major public health crisis. This epidemic has left no race, socioeconomic status, or age unaffected. Children in Oklahoma are no exception; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 25% of Oklahoma's adolescents are at risk for overweight or are overweight.
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