Shawnee Haws received her Doctor of Physical Therapy from the University of Utah in 2005, and is a certified Pilates instructor and educator.  Her current clinical practice includes the treatment of many orthopedic conditions with a focus on proper neuromuscular re-education after injury

Everyone is welcome! Light refreshments will be served.

Thursday, May 23^rd
11am – noon
Hope Fox Eccles Health Library
Located just off the Main Lobby in University Hospital (next to Starbucks)

Among the items featured in the collection are photographs of international nurse uniforms, dental cartoons, health and hygiene puzzle blocks from China, U.S. Army malaria pinup calendars, Adolf Hitler’s X-rays, and a volume on the art of palm reading. Each item highlighted in the book has been specially selected and is paired with a commentary from a scholar on the history and significance of the item. “Some things are charming and entertaining. Others are disturbing to look at, or document terrible things,” Sappol says. “There’s a lot in the book. In some cases it’s a document of human suffering, showing the diseases and afflictions people have. In other cases, it’s a document of ingenuity and coming up with treatments.”¹

Hidden Treasure is available as a free download from NLM’s Digital Collections or, if you’d like a hardcopy to entertain your guests, you can purchase it through major online booksellers. You can also find a review in The New York Times.

1 http://infocus.nlm.nih.gov/2012/07/new-book-reveals-nlm-hidden-tr.html

Book Cover: http://irp.nih.gov/catalyst/v20i2/hidden-treasures-at-nlm

Move your mouse over a region (one or more provinces) and it turns a darker shade of grey. Click on the region, and it takes you to a map of that region. Using the map tools (zoom, move, etc.), you can zoom quite far in to a given area.

A tool like this could help show patterns in areas needing additional education and outreach. And if the U.S. had a map like this, one could add an optional overlay to note “red” and “blue” states, which might offer additional insights for which political leaders could be enlisted to assist with raising awareness and health literacy levels.

Does the U.S. have a map like this? How else could this information be used? Tell us (in the comments)!

According to Dr. Jing Fang, an epidemiologist in CDC’s Division of Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, the increased prevalence is largely due to lifestyle factors including obesity, high blood pressure and smoking. This report also notes that caring for stroke survivors cost our economy an estimated $18.8 billion during 2008, plus an extra $15.5 billion due to lost productivity and premature mortality.

Since higher education levels show a decreased prevalence of stroke in this report, it seems only natural to assume that health education and outreach would help combat this. As reported in a previous post, the  El Paso County Public Health department has partnered with Harrison High School to integrate health literacy education into classes beyond the traditional physical education and health offerings. If programs such as this were implemented nationwide, it could help reduce the incidence of stroke and other preventable causes of long-term disability. Such outreach efforts would probably more than pay for themselves in the long run.

What outreach efforts to improve health outcomes for U.S. citizens do you think should be better funded? Tell us!

In addition to surveying everyday Americans, this poll “examined sick Americans’ experiences with and perceptions of the costs and quality of medical care over the last year. ‘Sick Americans’ (27% of adults surveyed) are defined as those who said they had a serious illness, medical condition, injury, or disability requiring a lot of medical care or who had been hospitalized overnight in the past 12 months.”  Of the 1,508 adults randomly surveyed, nearly three-quarters consider healthcare costs to be a “very serious problem,” and about half consider the quality of healthcare a serious problem as well.

Of those polled who fell into the “sick Americans” category, one in six could not get the medical care they needed for the following reasons:

• Could not afford medical care: 52%
• Insurance would not cover: 24%

We have the most expensive healthcare, per capita, in the world, yet not everyone can get the care they need when they need it. Just what is it we are paying for, then?

Have you been hospitalized or had a serious illness, medical condition, injury, or disability requiring a lot of medical care in the last 12 months? If so, could you afford the care you needed? If not, why not? Tell us!

Obesity is common, serious, and costly. More than one-third of adults (35.7%) and approximately 17% of children and adolescents are obese.

To confront this epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is collaborating “with public health researchers and practitioners, partners, state and community leaders to raise awareness, share evidence-based strategies.”  Since visual messages are among the most powerful in today’s society, the CDC has developed a series of four videos that document the consequences, costs, and challenges for confronting obesity as part of their “Weight of the Nation” campaign:

• Part 1: Consequences
• Part 2: Choices
• Part 3: Children in Crisis
• Part 4: Challenges

The videos are just over one hour in length, and premiered May 14-15 on HBO. Below is the first video to get our readers started.

How has obesity adversely affected your life, or the lives of those you care about? If you have overcome obesity, how did you do it? Tell us!

Popular social media sites have millions of registered users (Facebook, over 800 million; Twitter, over 500 million; WordPress, over 15 million), many of whom log in daily to share intimate details of their lives, including symptoms, illnesses and struggles with chronic diseases. This is a treasure trove of informal data available for research and monitoring of public health issues. While tapping this resource raises many ethical issues, particularly individual identification, initial research has demonstrated that it may help with disease surveillance.

St Louis and Zorlu offer the following examples:

• Recent analysis of three million tweets from May – December 2009 showed that “the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak could have been identified on Twitter one week before it emerged in official records from general practitioner reports”
• Physicians, unable to reach patients with chronic conditions after the tsunami in Japan in March 2011, turned to Twitter and the mobile Internet to direct patients to sources for their medications.
• Digital surveillance platforms such as BioCaster and HealthMap regularly search and extract information from news, social media and other sites looking for hints and clues of new public health threats.

While these examples are compelling, and collaborations between HealthMap and public health agencies are underway to track influenza and other public health challenges, Twitter cannot replace traditional methods of tracking and verifying diseases. How many times have you or someone you know attributed symptoms to one illness, only to find it was a different illness? Monitoring must be coupled with verification, else we risk spreading rumor and panic.

Do you use Twitter or other social media to talk about your health concerns and conditions? How do you feel about having this information monitored for the good of many? Tell us!

References:

St Louis, C., & Zorlu, G. (2012). Can Twitter predict disease outbreaks? BMJ, 344, e2353. doi: 10.1136/bmj.e2353

Szomszor, M., Kostkova, P., & De Quincey, E. (2012). Swineflu: Twitter predicts swine flu oubreak in 2009.

Tamura, Y., & Fukuda, K. (2011). Earthquake in Japan. Lancet, 377(9778), 1652. doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(11)60672-7

Among participants with low HL, 28.8% self-reported as being uninsured, compared to 16% of people with adequate HL. For those respondents who reported being employed full time, ” those with low HL were less likely to have been offered employer-based health insurance than those with adequate HL (19.9 percent versus 11.4 percent).” And while participants with low HL were just as likely to be employed full-time as those with adequate HL, they were less likely to have been offered health insurance by their employer.

This study has implications for federal, state and local public policy, such as the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Using the results as an estimate of HL levels in the U.S. population as a whole, about ten million of the thirty-two million people who will now have access to medical care under ACA will have low or poor HL, and probably many more than that. How will we implement the ACA in ways that will accommodate persons with:

• Low HL
• Inadequate computer and information literacy skills (navigating insurance exchange websites, understanding online forms, weighing pros and cons and trade-offs, etc.)
• English as their second language
• Cognitive and physical disabilities

This also has enormous implications for libraries, especially public libraries. At a time when budgets are being frozen or slashed, and branches are being closed, libraries will be hard-pressed to meet the resulting increase in demand for computer and Internet access. Library staff will be asked to help patrons navigate the myriad choices being offered by these insurance exchanges with little or no additional training. And if a librarian helps a patron successfully navigate this selection process, could the library be sued if something goes awry with insurance, medical care, etc?

While the concept of insurance exchanges seems like a good idea, without adequate preparation and support,  it may not succeed, and in a short time opponents of health insurance reform will renew their calls to “repeal Obamacare” as it is currently mis-labeled. To help people successfully access this yet-to-be created system, why not:

1. Involve librarians in the planning and organization of the insurance exchanges themselves
2. Provide additional funding to state libraries and the National Network of Libraries of Medicine to train staff at public libraries on how to assist patrons through this process.
3. Provide additional funding for computers and high-speed Internet access.

Librarians already have too much on their plate, so some things may need to be set aside as a result. But we will cope while doing our best to serve our patrons.

How else should libraries prepare for this next challenge? What have you, our fellow librarians, learned from other endeavors that would assist us in preparing? Tell us!

Health literacy is the ability to get information, understand it, and use information to lower risk and better health.

In addition, this site posted a YouTube video from Harvard School of Public Health’s Dr. Rima Rudd, Senior Lecturer on Society, Human Development, and Health. In it, she talks about the “Perspective” article she wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine on improving Americans’ health literacy.

Unfortunately, NEJM’s link to one of the sources cited in her paper is not working properly, namely, the report “Literacy & Health Outcomes” from AHRQ (the link to the left works). If only librarians had been consulted in the building of the Internet and World Wide Web…

…is being outpaced by most other developed countries when it comes to improvements in health outcomes, according to a new analysis by a researcher at the University Of Washington School Of Public Health. The researcher, Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in global health, says the decline comes despite increased U.S. spending on health care services.

In a published study titled “The Hurrider I Go the Behinder I Get: The Deteriorating International Ranking of U.S. Health Status,” Bezruchka looked at statistics on Infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy at birth and at age 50, and adult mortality as mortality measures that reflect health over the course of one’s life, comparing them across developed countries. This study offers a succinct summary of its findings as follows:

1. Around 1950, the United States had among the best health outcomes measured by mortality indicators, but 60 years later, it ranked behind the other rich countries and a number of poorer ones.
2. The differences in mortality outcomes between the United States and the healthiest nations today represent substantial inequalities in health.
3. Reasons for this relative decline are likely due to structural changes related to societal determinants of population health stemming from high economic inequality and lack of attention to early life issues.
4. Public awareness of deteriorating health rankings in the United States is limited, so the next steps to improving health require major communication strategies.

Why do you think we have fallen so far behind in health outcomes compared to the rest of the developed world? What can or should we do to change it? Tell us!

This campaign encourages women to call 9-1-1 immediately if they experience one or more of the most common symptoms of heart attack:

• Chest pain or discomfort
• Unusual upper-body discomfort
• Shortness of breath
• Breaking out in a cold sweat
• Unusual or unexplained fatigue (tiredness)
• Light-headedness or sudden dizziness
• Nausea (feeling sick to the stomach)

More information can be found at the Make the Call website, including a quiz, how to survive a heart attack, and information about the myth of the “Hollywood Heart Attack.”

Interdisciplinary teams of graduate or undergraduate students can win a portion of $18,000 in prize money for creating ”effective, innovative apps that take on the nation’s pressing health issues” utilizing existing DHHS health data to “engage and empower people in ways that lead to better health:”

The Challenge

With an abundance of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data and other health data available as part of the Health Data Initiative (HDI), students have an unprecedented opportunity to create interactive apps and other tools that engage and empower people in ways that lead to better health. Working in interdisciplinary teams that meld technological skills with health knowledge, the IOM and NAE believe that college students can generate exciting and powerful new products – the next “viral” apps – to improve health for communities and individuals.

To “Go Viral To Improve Health”:

• Identify a health problem in your college’s surrounding community
• Assemble an interdisciplinary student team
• Develop an app using data from the HHS Health Indicators Warehouse and other data sources
• Demonstrate how your solution will engage people in your community to promote action that will improve their health

Details are available at the Institute of Medicine website, and groups wishing to promote this challenge can download and print a flyer.

If you were part of such a team, what would you design? How would you use an app to address a pressing community health problem? Tell us!

The Make the Call. Don’t Miss a Beat. campaign is a national public education campaign that aims to educate, engage, and empower women and their families to learn the seven most common symptoms of a heart attack and encourage them to call 9-1-1 as soon as those symptoms arise.

The campaign, developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health, encourages women to make the call to 9-1-1 immediately if they experience one or more of the following heart attack symptoms:

• Chest pain, discomfort, pressure, or squeezing
• Shortness of breath
• Nausea
• Light-headedness or sudden dizziness
• Unusual upper body pain or discomfort in one or both arms, back, shoulder, neck, jaw, or upper part of the stomach
• Unusual fatigue
• Breaking out in a cold sweat

For more information on the campaign, visit womenshealth.gov/heartattack.

More special events coming, so stay tuned!

Recent federal policy initiatives, including the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy, and the Plain Writing Act of 2010, have brought health literacy to a tipping point—that is, poised to make the transition from the margins to the mainstream.

Much of our health system assumes that every patient we see has strong health literacy skills, and can be strong advocates for themselves. But, as a video in a previous post clearly demonstrated, many ordinary people find the process of understanding and acting correctly on instructions from their providers a difficult challenge. One study cited found that only 12% of U.S. adults have sufficient health literacy skills to understand and effectively utilize health information. This can lead to hospitalization when a patient does not follow prescription instructions correctly, or recognize when their condition is worsening. Healthcare providers and organizations can change their processes and procedures in ways that can make a clear difference:

• Improve providers’ communication skills.
• Simplify and make written materials easier to understand.
• Improve patients’ self-management skills.

This article goes on to illustrate how three recent major policy initiatives are creating an opening to move beyond this cycle of “crisis care:”

• The Affordable Care Act,
• the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy, and
• the Plain Writing Act of 2010

Together, these initiatives are moving the concept and practice of health literacy from the margin to the mainstream.

Copies of Ms. Harriman’s recently published book, Health Care in Mobile: An Oral History of the 1940s will be available for purchase and signing by the author. This work presents a small oral history of the delivery of health care in Mobile, AL, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. It includes the beliefs, behaviors, expectations, and experiences of individuals whose lives have been entwined with community and health care.

Ms. Pearce also has ties to the Mobile area and underwent her nursing education in the region. She trained with the Daughters of Charity who have long been devoted to the elimination of disparities in health care. Ms. Pearce will share with us some of her personal experience and insights gained from her involvement with this organization.

• Date: Friday, January 27, 2012
• Time: 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
• Where: Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library (main floor)
• What: presentation and book signing
• Questions? Contact Christy Jarvis, Collections Librarian, at

Refreshments will be provided. Please join us for the first of what we hope will be a series of fun and informative public events.

Stories can be more powerful in communicating critical information than just presenting the facts. And as any parent of a teenager will tell you, teens will listen more to peers than parents. Using teen-created videos to communicate essential health messages is another great idea to promote this aspect of health literacy in young people.

Have you used videos or other forms of storytelling to teach young people about important health issues? Tell us about it!

Uganda’s multi-level health system served as the location for this proof-of-concept test. Using a traditional light microscope connected to a Java-enabled mobile phone with built-in camera, specially designed software for data transfer and labeling, and anonymous laboratory samples, researchers were able to capture interpretable images and video at different resolutions. Some phones worked better than others for this, and file size limited the number of images that can be sent at one time.

Another valuable aspect of this study is that it “used a bottom-up approach.”

End users and stakeholders were included in the design process and the initial testing of the system, increasing the chance of our concept to meaningfully improve laboratory services and support health workers and practitioners in their diagnosis and training.

Members of remote clinics expressed even expressed an interest in sharing slides between clinics for knowledge sharing and education. And health sciences students could benefit from having web access to multiple examples of similar conditions instead of a relative few in a textbook.

Reference:

Tuijn, C. J., B. J. Hoefman, et al. (2011). “Data and Image Transfer Using Mobile Phones to Strengthen Microscopy-Based Diagnostic Services in Low and Middle Income Country Laboratories.” PLoS ONE 6(12): e28348.

The program will begin in the spring semester after a newly-formed advisory committee spends six months planning what will best benefit students to learn. Once it begins, most, if not all, of their classes will include subject-relevant information they need to know about access to low cost health care, disease prevention, health insurance and more.

If successful, this will have a cost-saving benefit: it may reduce trips to the emergency room. Typically, those who cannot afford to see a physician wait until an illness or other medical condition has become so severe that they seek emergency care. With knowledge of how to find low-cost health care, fewer trips to the ER should be the result.

Having worked in public education, the number one complaint of students I’ve listened to say school is “boring,” which is usually translated as “not relevant to my life and experience.” Imagine the possibilities if a student has a family member or friend who faces a health  issue, and this student can help ameliorate the situation. If this program proves successful, it could serve as a model for other school districts around the country. And it might, just might, help reduce the rate at which healthcare costs are increasing, at least in this area. Good luck, Harrison High School!

The U.S. government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Ad Council have teamed up to launch a national health campaign aimed at empowering Latinos to ask their doctors questions.

Television, radio, print and Web ads in $30 million worth of donated advertising space will run in Latino-centric media showing people with ailments such as a bad back getting conflicting advice in places such as the laundromat and the barbershop before going to the doctor (from Fox News Latino).

The campaign is called Conoce las Preguntas (Know the Questions), and the advertisements direct viewers to the campaign’s website, which provides a kind of “roadmap” to a doctor’s visit. For example, it encourages patients to be clear on prescription instructions, and offers suggested follow-up questions to medical diagnoses. And it includes humorous videos such as this one showing  one Latino man asking for advice on an earache, and getting a variety of answers. (Click on the triangle-shaped “play” button to show the video.)

Video Credit: REVOLUCIÓN

PART ONE: Introduces users to the Environmental Health and Toxicology Portal and covers the basics of searching the TOXNET system, including saving, printing and downloading citations. The databases covered in this session address factual and bibliographic information about chemicals and toxicology. (Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 10:00-Noon)

PART TWO: Continues the exploration of the portal by introducing resources that can be used to learn about environmental exposure, map environmental release data, and find drug and dietary supplement information. (Friday, June 3, 2011 at 10:00-11:30 a.m.)

For more information contact Jeanne Le Ber; 801-585-6744

“Last week, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services launched HealthCare.gov, a new online tool for consumers. The site connects consumers with information and resources to help them access quality, affordable coverage in their community.”

Yet this reporter falls short in her responsibility to her readers by not providing links to reputable medical sites. All she writes is:

Some of the country’s most reputable medical institutions and organizations, including the Mayo Clinic and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, operate sites that the average person can look to for help diagnosing an ailment.

It is frustrating for librarians and other medical information professionals to see the ball being dropped like this. All it would have taken was a few extra moments to insert a link to Medline Plus, the CDC or Mayo Clinic and readers would be provided with better options than the imprecise catch-all Google. And Mayo Clinic even has an online symptom checker.

In addition, when looking at sites that offer medical information and advice, end users are encouraged to make sure that the site you are viewing is an established, trustworthy site. If you are browsing a website that is not associated with a major provider such as Mayo Clinic, make sure it has the Health On the Net (HON) Code certification.

The Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library (EHSL) provides links to a number of trustworthy online resources. On the Community page of our website visitors will find links to:

• Medline Plus
• Utahealthnet

and others. And while EHSL staff cannot give medical advice, we can direct you to additional resources — online, in print, etc. — that related directly to your question. You can contact us via instant messaging (IM), email, phone or in-person. We will do our best to point you to valid, trustworthy medical resources.

So don’t trust your health to an imprecise tool such as an online search engine, or the advice of a friend or neighbor. For general information on health topics, consult the resources suggested above. For information on specific health issues for yourself or your family, always check with your doctor.

NLM has a page listing links to information on crude oil spills and human health at http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/dimrc/oilspills.html.  It specifically is focused on the United States and the state agencies response to oil spills.

For the latest updates about the recent spill and the controlled burning clean up go to “Featured Sites.”