Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children recently released a report in their role as a principal partner with the Pre-K for PA Campaign, the third installment comparing Pennsylvania’s per-capita investments in pre-k. The Road to Success Includes High-Quality Pre-K shows states with similar political compositions and quality standards are making stronger per capita investments, putting their early learners on the road to success in school and in life at a faster pace than Pennsylvania. If Pennsylvania want to pave the way to success in adulthood for OUR early learners, we need to increase our investments in high-quality, publicly funded pre-k, because 56 percent of eligible children do not have access to this vital education.

 

The U.S. Surgeon General released a report on smoking cessation that reviews and updates evidence on the importance of quitting smoking. The report discusses the immediate and long-term health and economic benefits of smoking cessation at the individual and societal levels. The report also covers clinical and population-based interventions that have been shown to effectively increase smoking cessation.

Click here for more information.

Thomas Vaughn, PhD; Fred Ullrich, BA; Muska Nataliansyah, MPH and Keith J. Mueller, PhD

Advances in technology have made it easier to provide telemedicine services, but the actual value of telemedicine programs for health systems providing those services or for patients has not been firmly established. This paper from the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis explores organizational motivations of three large health systems for incorporating telemedicine patient care services.

Click to download a copy: Strategic Choice in Developing Telemedicine – Observations from Three Organizations

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RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis
University of Iowa
College of Public Health
Department of Health Management and Policy
145 Riverside Drive, N200 – CPHB
Iowa City, IA 52242
Phone: (319) 384-3831
Fax: (319) 384-4371

Web site: www.public-health.uiowa.edu/rupri

Follow us on Twitter! @RUPRIhealth

Conventional measures of innovation suggest that only big cities foster new ideas, but a more comprehensive measure developed at Penn State shows that innovation is widespread even in rural places not typically thought of as innovative. This “hidden” innovation brings economic benefits to businesses and communities, according to researchers, whose findings will help decision makers think in new ways about innovation and how they can support it.  Full story

The Greater Susquehanna Valley and Columbia-Montour United Ways released a comprehensive report and strategic plan to address Youth Mental Health in Rural Central Pennsylvania.

The report is the result of the Rural Central Pennsylvania Youth Mental Health Task Force, led by the United Ways. This is a group of nearly sixty school social workers, counselors, community/non-profit leaders, and mental health providers which originally convened in Nov. 2018 to discuss the growing challenge we face with increasing youth mental health issues.

According to the Pennsylvania Youth Survey (PAYS) 2018 results, more than one in third of the adolescents in our region (Columbia, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder, and Union counties) report having felt sad or depressed most days in the last twelve months; one in five report having planned their suicide; and one in five report having attempted suicide. Further, according to the Centers for Disease Control, youth in rural areas are 1.8 more likely to die by suicide.

“The data is alarming,” says Joanne Troutman, president & CEO of Greater Susquehanna Valley. “So many children are not only not getting the services they need, but their mental health challenges often go unrecognized. Every system, from education to healthcare to human services, are vastly under-resourced when it comes to mental health supports.  In our rural community, we face multiple challenges which take away from the holistic care, nurturing, and mental growth of our young people. The report details each challenge and respective recommendations and objectives. The report also attempts to paint a comprehensive picture of the current Youth Mental Health landscape as well as the next steps and a policy agenda for how to enact change.”

The plan lists the following goals to be accomplished over the next 10 years, as reflected by the PAYS survey and other local data:

• improving depressive symptoms of adolescents in each county by 50 percent
• improving “Total Protection” of adolescents by 10 points
• eliminating adolescent deaths by suicide

Greater Susquehanna Valley United Way and United Way of Columbia-Montour County are collective impact organizations serving rural central Pennsylvania, the counties of Columbia, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder and Union. The mission of United Way is to fight for the health, income and financial stability of every person in every community.

With the economic and societal costs of smoking totaling more than $300 billion a year and rising, the personal-finance website WalletHub released its report on The Real Cost of Smoking by State as well as accompanying videos.

To encourage the estimated 34.2 million tobacco users in the U.S. to kick the dangerous habit, WalletHub calculated the potential monetary losses — including the lifetime and annual costs of a cigarette pack per day, health care expenditures, income losses and other costs — brought on by smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke.

The Financial Cost of Smoking in Pennsylvania (1=Lowest, 25=Avg.):

• Out-of-Pocket Cost per Smoker – $149,851 (Rank: 40^th)
• Financial-Opportunity Cost per Smoker – $1,313,711 (Rank: 40^th)
• Health-Care Cost per Smoker – $181,156 (Rank: 36^th)
• Income Loss per Smoker – $248,492 (Rank: 30^th)
• Other Costs per Smoker – $10,838 (Rank: 13^th)
• Total Cost Over Lifetime per Smoker: $1,904,049
• Total Cost per Year per Smoker: $37,334

For the full report, please visit:
https://wallethub.com/edu/the-financial-cost-of-smoking-by-state/9520/

The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services’ (DHS) Suicide Prevention Task Force completed the statewide listening sessions held throughout fall 2019 and compiled their finding into an initial report. The work of the task force is a complement to the goals and strategies surrounding the governor’s Reach Out PA: Your Mental Health Matters initiative announced earlier this month and his executive order to protect vulnerable populations signed last year.  Informed by the testimonies and suggestions of people affected by suicide, mental health professionals, and other stakeholders from across the commonwealth, the report will be used to develop a comprehensive, long-term strategy for significantly reducing the number of suicides in Pennsylvania.

Feedback from Listening Sessions

In August, the task force announced a series of 10 public listening sessions to be hosted throughout Pennsylvania. Over the next several months, Pennsylvanians gathered to talk about how suicide has affected their lives to help inform the task force’s draft prevention plan and work to reduce stigma around discussing topics such as mental health and suicide. More than 800 people — community members, state and local officials, representatives from county suicide prevention organizations, and stakeholders from other sectors of government — attended the sessions.

As a direct result of these listening sessions, the Suicide Prevention Task Force has identified the following key themes to inform the commonwealth’s four-year suicide prevention strategy:

• The stigma associated with mental health, suicide, and suicide attempts can affect the likelihood of individuals seeking help or continuing treatment, and how policymakers make decisions that affect mental health systems.
• Resources needed to elevate mental health as a public health issue, incentivize the integration of physical and behavioral health, and improve suicide prevention resources at the local level.
• Barriers to treatment, such as cost and insurance gaps.
• Access to more detailed suicide and suicide attempt data to help policymakers make effective, meaningful decisions.
• Issues within the mental health workforce, such as pay and barriers to entry, to improve quality of care.
• With proper resources, Pennsylvania’s schools and educators are uniquely positioned to save lives with suicide prevention strategies and resources.

The Legislature could take direct action to prevent suicides through the passage of a Red Flag Law (to provide a means to remove firearms from someone at risk for suicide) or safe storage requirements for firearms.

Suicide Prevention Plan

The task force anticipates releasing a comprehensive four-year statewide suicide prevention plan in the first quarter of 2020 that will be available for a public comment period. Following updates based on public comment, the task force will publish the final 2020-2024 Pennsylvania statewide suicide prevention plan, which will include:

• The landscape and gap analysis of detailed suicide statistics nationwide and in Pennsylvania.
• Guiding principles for suicide prevention in Pennsylvania.
• Goals and objectives to reduce suicide and suicide attempts in Pennsylvania, including reducing the stigma associated with suicide, suicide attempts, and mental health challenges.
• Recommendations for local and state policymakers, including public and elected officials, as well as cross-sector partners.
• A structure for the implementation and evaluation of Pennsylvania’s statewide suicide prevention plan.

You can read the task force’s initial report online. For more information on the task force visit the Suicide Prevention Task Force DHS web page.

Rural areas have long been racially and ethnically diverse. Yet most research on rural health focuses on rural-urban disparities without an explicit focus on within-rural differences in health by race and ethnicity. In that research on rural-urban disparities in health, rural residents tend to fare worse on most measures, including mortality, health status, access to care, and use of preventive services. Less is known about whether there are differences in healthcare use among rural residents by race and ethnicity. In this from the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research center, researchers examine differences in preventive care among rural residents by race and ethnicity.  The brief can be accessed here.

Rural residents often travel farther to access medical care, especially obstetric care, and are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured than urban residents, contributing to higher rates of maternal morbidity. To raise awareness and increase understanding of the relationship between transfer, delivery hospital location, and severe maternal morbidity and mortality (SMMM) for rural residents, researchers at the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center compared data for rural and urban residents who gave birth between 2008 and 2014, to describe the relationship between a need to transfer patients for specialized care and increased risk for maternal morbidity and mortality.  The report can be accessed here.