The Voice Box
Voice from Tobacco Prevention and Control in N.C. |
|
Volume 2, Issue 2 |
|
Inside this Issue |
|
Prevention
Rx: Estabilishing Your Healthcare Prevention System |
| From the
Tobacco Control Advocate's Bookshelf |
| Cartoon |
| N.C.
Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Public Health
N.C. Department of
Health and Human Services
|
(Reprinted from the Advocacy Institute's newsletter. February, 2005)
Leadership for A Changing World
Over the past five years, our Leadership for A Changing World Awardees and their colleagues have taught us some key lessons about leadership.
When planning a campaign, assessing current progress and looking to next steps, or even just pausing and asking "where do we go from here?" social justice advocates can strengthen the leadership in their campaigns by:
For awardees, "Leadership Is":
- Turning to the community as a source of strength
- Linking their issues to a wider context
- Choosing short-term goals that also add to long-term change
- Of the community - Most Leadership for a changing World Awardees come from the communities they're serving, so it's a working-from-within/inreach model vs. a working "on" or outreach model. [If they're outsiders, they're listeners. They;ve become part of the community through a deep respect of community voices and have become authentic members of the community by demonstrating that respect and committment over time.]
- Sources by Authentic Voices - Awardees engage in activities that grow voice among the people they're organizing/working with. There is a belief in the centrality of story to making change.
- Comprehensive - Leadership creates change on two fronts, all the time.
(To learn more, or sign up for the newsletter, visit http://www.iscvt.org/)
- The Daily work - do the thing in front of you. Save a life -- house, feed, empower or support someone.
- The Big work - tear it down. Do the systems/movement work that changes the whole picture.
Table of Contents
The Tobacco Prevention and Control Branch's (TPCB) Surveillance and Evaluation Team, with significant help from local and statewide partners, have redesigned the Progress Tracking System (PTS) that had been used for the last four years. The new system, known as iPTS (indicator Progress Tracking System), is based on critical focus areas that are linked to the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) tobacco control goals.
Each focus area has several key indicators or milestones that culminate to a higher order program or policy change (ranging from media to presentations to program/policy changes). In addition, each focus area had additional space to summarize important infrastructure event that lead to indicator changes (planning meetings, on-going partnerships, etc).
The process of developing a new system started back in April 2004. At that time, PTS had recently tripled in size and plans were underway for additional program monitoring. The old system worked great when there were ten grantees, but as the number increased to more than forty, managing and interpreting the data became an issue.
Over the summer of 2004, representatives from both TPCB and UNC's Tobacco Prevention Evaluation Program (TPEP) worked with a computer programmer to develop the beta version of iPTS. Thirty grantees participated in pilot testing and making recommendations to the final version.
In January and February, Eighty-Seven grantees were trained on how to use the new system. By March 5, all CDC and Health and Wellness Trust Fund (HWTF) grantees were reporting into the new system.
A major feature of the new system is a feedback loop to the grantees from the TPCB. With monthly feedback to all grantees and HWTF. TPCB feels it will provide higher quality technical assistance and a more objective assissment on how each grant compares to its Annual Action Plan (AAP).
In the future, the iPTS Team will work with each grangee to improve the data quality. As the Field Team works with grantees to prepare their AAPs, these targets will become part of the monitoring system for the next fiscal year.
For more information, contact your regional field team contact Mike Placona via email or 919-715-3667.
Table of Contents
As a healthcare provider, have you ever wondered how to get your tobacco-using patients to quit? Have you learned everything there is to know about the "5As" but wonder how it could possibly work in your practice?
Wonder no longer, because a workshop is coming to your area that can help answer these universal and perplexing questions.
N.C. Prevention Partners, in collaboration with the N.C. Area Health Education Center System (AHEC), is offering "Prevention Rx: Establishing Your Healthcare Prevention System." Workshops were held in Asheville on April 27 and Greenville on May 2. A workshop is scheduled for May 26 in Charlotte. The purpose of this training is to help participants establish a health care prevention system for their office, clinic, agency, hospital, health department or community health center. Participants will receive valuable materials, including the Starting the Conversation tools for tobacco, nutrition and physical activity, and information on how to obtain personalized clinic materials. Participants will also role-play to practice using the Starting the Conversation tools for effective patient screening, counseling and referrals.
Specifically, participants will learn how to incorporate evidence-based tobacco cessation interventions into their practice, from identifying a cessation contact for the clinic to optimizing documentation and filing for reimbursement to practicing counseling using the 5As through role-playing, among other topics. Workshop attendees will learn how to take the existing evidence-based recommendations for tobacco cessation interventions and incorporate them in a practical and useful manner to their daily office routine. Similar information will be presented for physical activity and nutrition recommendations to provide a complete healthcare prevention program.
Table of Contents
The Health and Wellness Trust Fund's (HWTF) Tobacco.Reality.Unfiltered. Campaign has received honors.
Two of the TRU T.V. ads were honored at the National Telly Awards, a competition that recognizes outstanding local, regional and cable T.V. commercials and programs.
TRU was honored with a Silver Telly Award, the top prize category in the competition, for its "Anna" ad, and a Bronze Telly Award for its "Jacobi" ad. Both are thirty-second spots that feature emotional testimonials from North Carolina teens about the adverse health consequences of tobacco use.
The TRU Road Trip, conducted around the state last summer, is a finalist for a National Sabre Award, a competition for public relations and marketing campaigns. The Holmes Report, one of the industry's top trade publications, sponsors the award.
The Road Trop is a finalist in the Marketing to Youth category, competing with some of the biggest and best-known agencies in the world. Other campaigns in the finalist competition include: Microsoft's "Information Worker Board of the Future" by Waggner Edstrom; Old Spice's "Let's Get Guys Talking About Sweat" by Paine PR; Nintendo's youth marketing campaign by Gokin Harris; and The Recording Academy's "What's the Download" campaign by Edelman.
Winners will be announced May 18, 2005.
To view the TRU Campaign, visit www.realityunfiltered.com.
Table of Contents
SPARK PLUG
Values-Based Life and Leadership Skills
At the end of every July, the Des Moines Register newspaper sponsors RAGBRAIâ, the world's oldest and largest organized bicycle tour (the 2004 ride is going on even now, as I write this). More than 12,000 people participate in this annual bike ride across Iowa, which, despite what you may have heard, is not flat. Tim Lane is a co-founder of Team Skunk, the bicycle club with which I ride. Every year, he gives a welcome to new members in which he admonishes us to leave each campsite better than we found it, but then to go one step higher and to leave each person we meet somehow better for the encounter.
On RAGBRAI XXVIII in July of 2000, one of our riders was Cindy Porteous, then-executive director of the National Association for Health and Fitness. Near the end of one particularly arduous day, she was struggling her way up a hill into a headwind when she felt a strong hand plant itself in the small of her back and began pusing her up the hill at a high rate of speed. Looking around, she discovered that the hand belonged to the leader of an Italian bicycling racing team, of which she had just become lead bike! It was an exhilirating moment!
The next day came a moment not so happy. Cindy was riding in a pack down a congested gravel road when a pickup truck came barreling toward them from the opposite direction. The driver showed no signs of slowing down or pulling over as he raced toward the bicycles, and riders frantically scattered to get out of his way. Cinty had no option but to ditch her bike, and sustained severe cuts and bruises plus a broken rib. Even more painful was the emotional damage; she had trained hard and come a long way for this ride, and now having been made the victim of a random act of recklessness would cut it short.
When Cindy came back from the hospital to our campsite that evening, physical pain and disappointment weighed heavily upon her. Tim, who had disappeared for several hours after reaching camp, was surprisingly ebullient, and went around telling everyone to make sure and be there at 6 o'clock, because something special would be happening. Sure enough, at the appointed hour the Italian bicycle racing team showed up. For a few magical moments, there was no language barrier as they presented Cindy with an official Italian bicycle team T-shirt, which they had all autographed, and as everyone posed for photos and shared a beer and a laugh.
Cindy laughed and cried, and it was obvious that in his own way, Tim had done as much for her healing as the doctors who stitched up te deep gash on her chin. Cindy has ridden on every RAGBRAI since. While memories of being chased off the road by a speeding pickup truck have faded, she will never forget the day she was an official member of the italian racing team. That afternoon, while the rest of us were propping up our sore legs and downing prodigious quantities of Gatorade and other liquids, Tim Lane was racing around from campsite to campsite in search of the Italians. He wasn't about to allow a fellow member of Team Skunk go home worse for having participated in the ride. It wasn't just Cindy who was affected by his commitment; His example has had a positive influence on every member of Team Skunk and, I imagine, on the Italian racing team as well.
I sometimes tell this story in employee group presentations. I close by asking this question: What would it be like to work in a place where everybody made the commitment that they were going to do their best to make sure that each employee went home alittle better than they came in at the beginning of their workday. The typical response is a collective sigh, followed by "WOW!"
Whenever I work with a support group, I am struck by the fact that - no matter how serious the problem is for which participants need support - nobody ever leaves a meeting in a worse frame of mind than they arrived. They always leave with a bit more courage, a bit more inspiration, and a bit more hope. I wish I could say the same about watching people come into work and then leaving at the end of the day! It is possible, but the CEO can't mandate it. It needs to be a grassroots realization that we can all serve each other by making sure that everybody leaves somehow better than they came in.
"Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it muse ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it."
Viktor E. Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning
Table of Contents
Water pipe smoking, also called "hookah," "shisha" and "hubble bubble," has been popular for generations in Asian and Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey, Iran, Bangledesh and Yemen.
The key difference between cigarette smoking and water pipe smoking is that the tobacco smoke passes through water before it is inhaled. Flavored and sweetened tobacco is regularly used in the water pipe.
While not extensively studied, popular perception is that this is less risky than traditional tobacco products because the water acts as a natural filter, and as such, water pipe smoking has increased in popularity among young adults, including some in the United States.
Recently, college students have asked about the health effects of water pipe smoking, as they had seen and heard that students were engaging in this trendy activity at restaurants and cafes. The medical literature has several articles about this type of tobacco smoking. Goven the recent popularity and trendiness of cigars, kreteks (cloves) and bidis over the past decade, water pipe smoking might be the next fashionable tobacco product. Because of its cultural contaxt and its historical use, water pipe smoking prevention might face similar challenges as tobacco use among American Indians in the United States. Water pipe smoking contains harmful constituents similar to the combustion of cigarette tobacco, and there is preliminary evidence linking water pipe smoking to the same life threatening conditions as cigarette smoking. No recommendations for treatment or public health policy interventions have been established. Future monitoring should include questions related to water pipe smoking, especially among young adults.
 Water Pipe |
 College Students on recent trip to Turkey using water pipe |
|
Reference:
Maziak W., Ward K.D., Afifi Soweid R.A., Eissenberg T. (2004)
Tobacco Smoking using a waterpipe: a
re-emerging strain in a global epidemic. Tob Control. Dec 13
(4):327-33. Review. |
|
From the Tobacco Advocate's
Bookshelf: Table of Contents
Table of Contents
If you have feedback or comments please let us know, OR you can contribute your own story about tobacco prevention and control in N.C. Please send to Julie Helsabeck.
