Improving HPV Vaccination Rates: A Comprehensive Evaluation of a Clinician-Centered Educational Initiative in a Wisconsin Health Care System.

Introduction: Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection poses significant public health concerns due to its prevalence and association with various cancers. This study assesses a 2014 quality improvement initiative in Wisconsin's largest health care system. The intervention aimed to improve HPV vaccine initiation and completion among eligible patients and to reduce the gap in vaccination rates between males and females.

Fostering Trust in Public Health Messaging: Tailoring Communication for Rural Parents.

Purpose: As pandemic-related mistrust of public health recommendations in rural communities may compound gaps in pediatric immunizations, our team explored parents' perceptions of trustworthiness in messaging.

Design: Qualitative study using 4 virtual focus groups.

Setting: Rural Wisconsin.

Designing and testing social media campaign messages to promote COVID-19 vaccine confidence among rural adults: A community-engaged approach featuring rural community leader and clinician testimonials.

Despite the growing availability of effective COVID-19 vaccines in rural communities in the United States, widespread vaccine hesitancy delays COVID-19 vaccine coverage in rural communities and threatens to worsen pre-pandemic rural-urban disparities in other vaccination rates, including influenza and routine pediatric immunizations. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop communication-based interventions to improve vaccine confidence in rural America. This study demonstrates the efficacy of a community-engaged approach to developing social media campaign messages in promoting COVID-19 vaccine uptake and pro-vaccine social diffusion among rural adults.

Explaining the U.S. rural disadvantage in COVID-19 case and death rates during the Delta-Omicron surge: The role of politics, vaccinations, population health, and social determinants.

The Delta-Omicron wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (Wave 4) in the United States occurred in Fall of 2021 through Spring of 2022. Although vaccinations were widely available, this was the deadliest period to date in the U.S.

What Were the Information Voids? A Qualitative Analysis of Questions Asked by Dear Pandemic Readers between August 2020-August 2021.

In the current infodemic, how individuals receive information (channel), who it is coming from (source), and how it is framed can have an important effect on COVID-19 related mitigation behaviors. In light of these challenges presented by the infodemic, Dear Pandemic (DP) was created to directly address persistent questions related to COVID-19 and other health topics in the online environment. This is a qualitative analysis of 3806 questions that were submitted by DP readers to a question box on the Dear Pandemic website between August 30, 2020 and August 29, 2021.

Dear Pandemic: A topic modeling analysis of COVID-19 information needs among readers of an online science communication campaign.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an "infodemic"-an overwhelming excess of accurate, inaccurate, and uncertain information. The social media-based science communication campaign Dear Pandemic was established to address the COVID-19 infodemic, in part by soliciting submissions from readers to an online question box. Our study characterized the information needs of Dear Pandemic's readers by identifying themes and longitudinal trends among question box submissions.

Lessons Learned From , a Social Media-Based Science Communication Project Targeting the COVID-19 Infodemic.

The World Health Organization has identified excessive COVID-19 pandemic-related information as a public health crisis, calling it an "infodemic." Social media allows misinformation to spread quickly and outcompete scientifically grounded information delivered via other methods. is an innovative, multidisciplinary, social media-based science communication project whose mission is to educate and empower individuals to successfully navigate the overwhelming amount of information circulating during the pandemic.

Dear Pandemic: Nurses as key partners in fighting the COVID-19 infodemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent proliferation of misinformation have created parallel public health crises. Social media offers a novel platform to amplify evidence-based communication to broader audiences. This paper describes the application of science communication engagement on social media platforms by an interdisciplinary team of female scientists in a campaign called Dear Pandemic.

Mandatory Health Care Provider Counseling For Parents Led To A Decline In Vaccine Exemptions In California.

Receipt of childhood vaccinations in the US has been declining, and outbreaks of preventable infectious diseases have become more common. In response, in 2014 California implemented a policy change for exemptions from mandatory vaccines for school enrollment. Data on fifteen successive cohorts of kindergarteners enrolled in public and private schools between school years 2001-02 and 2015-16 were analyzed for changes in vaccination trends.

Conditional admission, religious exemption type, and nonmedical vaccine exemptions in California before and after a state policy change.

Recent measles and pertussis outbreaks in the US have focused national attention on state laws governing exemptions from mandatory vaccines for school entry. After several years of increases in nonmedical exemptions in California, the state assembly passed Assembly Bill 2109 in 2012, making nonmedical exemptions more difficult to obtain by requiring parents to obtain a signature from a health care provider. We used data from the California Department of Public Health to describe changes in the overall prevalence of personal belief exemptions and compositional changes in immunization status for the school years 2012-2013 through 2015-2016.

Exemptions From Mandatory Immunization After Legally Mandated Parental Counseling.

Background: The success of health care provider counseling-based interventions to address vaccine hesitancy is not clear. In 2011, Washington State implemented Senate Bill 5005 (SB5005), requiring counseling and a signed form from a licensed health care provider to obtain an exemption. Evaluating the impact of a counseling intervention can provide important insight into population-level interventions that focus on interpersonal communication by a health care provider.

REAL-TIME SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS: ASSOCIATIONS WITH OBJECTIVELY-MEASURED PHYSICAL ACTIVITY LEVELS.

Psychosocial stress may be a factor in the link between physical activity and obesity. This study examines how the daily experience of psychosocial stress influences physical activity levels and weight status in adults. This study reports temporally ordered relationships between sedentary, light, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity levels and real-time reports of subjective psychosocial stress levels.

Toward a Better Understanding of the Link Between Parent and Child Physical Activity Levels: The Moderating Role of Parental Encouragement.

Background: Research on adolescent physical activity is mixed regarding the role of parent activity. This study tested parent encouragement, direct modeling, and perceived influence as moderators of objectively-measured (accelerometer) parent and child moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) associations.

Methods: Parent-child dyads (n = 423; mean child age = 11.

Potential effects of California's new vaccine exemption law on the prevalence and clustering of exemptions.

Exemptions from childhood immunizations required for school entry have continued to increase among California kindergartners, and exemptions show spatial clustering within the state. A 2014 change in California's school-entry vaccine exemption law requires parents filing for an exemption to submit signed documents from a health care provider. However, the evidence presented here suggests that the policy change will probably not be sufficient to reverse the growing trend in vaccine refusals.

Redefining neighborhoods using common destinations: social characteristics of activity spaces and home census tracts compared.

Research on neighborhood effects has focused largely on residential neighborhoods, but people are exposed to many other places in the course of their daily lives-at school, at work, when shopping, and so on. Thus, studies of residential neighborhoods consider only a subset of the social-spatial environment affecting individuals. In this article, we examine the characteristics of adults' "activity spaces"-spaces defined by locations that individuals visit regularly-in Los Angeles County, California.

Toward a multidimensional understanding of residential neighborhood: a latent profile analysis of Los Angeles neighborhoods and longitudinal adult excess weight.

People are embedded in a complex socio-spatial context that may affect their weight status through multiple mechanisms, including food and physical activity opportunities and chronic stress exposure. However, research to date has been unable to resolve what features of neighborhoods are causally related to weight status. We used latent profile analysis to identify three "types" of neighborhoods (based on five dimensions of neighborhood social status) in Los Angeles, CA.

Overview of significant changes in the Minimum Data Set for nursing homes version 3.0.

The Minimum Data Set (MDS) is a standardized assessment that is completed on all residents admitted to Medicare certified nursing homes in the US. It is also completed on all residents admitted to Veteran Health Administration Community Living Centers. Its content addresses multiple domains of resident health and function and is intended to facilitate better recognition of each resident's needs.

Exposure of California kindergartners to students with personal belief exemptions from mandated school entry vaccinations.

Objectives: Personal belief exemptions (PBEs) from mandated school entry vaccinations have increased in California over the past decade. Infectious disease outbreaks in the state may be associated with the aggregation of intentionally unvaccinated children within schools. We sought to quantify the exposure of California kindergartners to children with PBEs at school.

Eyes on the Block: Measuring Urban Physical Disorder Through In-Person Observation.

In this paper, we present results from measuring physical disorder in Los Angeles neighborhoods. Disorder measures came from structured observations conducted by trained field interviewers. We examine inter-rater reliability of disorder measures in depth.

Obesity and diabetes: two growing epidemics in California.

The prevalence of both diabetes and obesity has grown significantly in California. Six million adults are obese and an additional 9.3 million are overweight.

Why not just ask the resident?

This research evaluated a draft preference assessment tool (draft-PAT) designed to replace the current Customary Routine section of the Minimum Data Set (MDS) for nursing homes. The draft-PAT was tested with a sample of nursing home residents to evaluate survey-level administration time and noncompletion rates, as well as item-level nonresponse rates, response distributions, and test-retest reliability. Modifications to the draft-PAT were then retested with a subsample of residents.

Bubbling over: soda consumption and its link to obesity in California.

Background The prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased dramatically in both adults and children in the last three decades in the n California, 62% of adolescents ages 12-17 and 41% of children ages 2-11 drink at least one soda or other sweetened beverage every day. In addition, 24% of adults drink at least one soda or other sweetened beverage on an average day. Adults who drink soda occasionally (not every day) are 15% more likely to be overweight or obese, and adults who drink one or more sodas per day are 27% more likely to be overweight or obese than adults who do not drink soda, even when adjusting for poverty status and race/ethnicity.