November 13-14, 2008

Location:
M. D. Anderson Basic Sciences Research Building
Onstead Auditorium
6767 Bertner Avenue, 3rd Floor
Houston, Texas 77030

Presented By:
Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, and Texas Children's Hospital, Adolescent Medicine Service Houston, Texas

More Information: Conference Information, Save-The-Date Card

Online Registration: www.BaylorCME.org/CME/1411

The Leadership Education for Adolescent Health (LEAH)/State Adolescent Health Coordinators (SAHC) Tele conference Series held a tele conference on Thursday, February 21, 2008 from 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm ET.  Adolescent Access to Health Care was the topic of the session. Materials from this tele conference are now available for viewing.

On Thursday, November 15, 2007, the Leadership Education for Adolescent Health (LEAH)/State Adolescent Health Coordinators (SAHC) Teleconference Series conducted the second in a two part series on the prevention and treatment of adolescent obesity. The second teleconference focused on Best Practices in Public Health Interventions regarding Adolescent Obesity. Materials from the teleconference are now available.

On Thursday, September 20, 2007, the Leadership Education for Adolescent Health (LEAH)/State Adolescent Health Coordinators (SAHC) Teleconference Series conducted the first in a two part series on the prevention and treatment of adolescent obesity. The first teleconference focused on giving an overview and public health perspective of the new evidence-based Expert Committee Recommendations for the Prevention, Assessment and Treatment of Childhood Obesity. The teleconference also discussed physical activity interventions with an emphasis on the built environment approach. Materials from the teleconference are now available.

The Leadership Education for Adolescent Health (LEAH)/State Adolescent Health Coordinators (SAHC) Tele conference Series held a teleconference on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 from 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm ET.  It was the second in a two part series on adolescent mental health issues.  Preventing depression and suicide in adolescents and school and community based mental health services were the topics of the tele conference.  The moderator was David Knopf, LCSW, MPH, LEAH Faculty, Children's Hospital at UCSF.  The presenters were Lloyd Potter Ph.D, MPH, Children's Safety Network and the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and Cheryl Di Cara, Maine Injury Prevention Program and Maine Youth Suicide Prevention Program.  Materials from this tele conference are now available for viewing.  

Materials from the last SAHC Teleconference, February 2007, are now available for download.  They are organized in the State AH Coordinators section of this website.   

The next LEAH/SAHC tele conference is scheduled for Thursday, February 15, 2007, 1-2:30 pm EST.  

Mental Health l: An overview of mental health issues related to youth:

• Statistics
• Strategies(For dealing with barriers including stigma)
• Screenings
• Systems of care

It will be presented by Gwendolyn J. Adam, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., LEAH faculty at Baylor College of Medicine Texas Children’s Hospital and Matt Aalsma, PhD, LEAH faculty at the Indiana University Medical Center   This session will provide information on mental health issues related to youth in new, interesting and thought provoking ways that will be very useful to State Adolescent Health Coordinators.    The tele conference will follow the typical format of the previous tele conferences; presentation, questions and an opportunity to discuss the topic with national experts.   It is not too late to sign up.  Simply email to register.

The first LEAH/State Adolescent Health Coordinators (SAHC) teleconference
was held on July 20.  In all, 23 SAHC and their invited state-level colleagues participated in the conference which focused on Healthy Youth Development.  Michael Resnick (UMN), Sydney McDonald and Shirley Robinson-Hankins (UAB) taught this first session.  Please click on the State AH Coordinators menu item to access teleconference materials from the first conference.

The second LEAH/SAHC teleconference was held on October 19, 2006.  The call focused on untangling potential adolescent health controversies surrounding HPV, the vaccine for the Human Papilloma virus, emergency contraception, Plan B in particular, and a brief update on the current CDC recommendations on Chlamydia and HIV testing.  Presenters were Erica Monasterio, MSN, RN, FNP, University of California, San Francisco and Mary Ott, MD, Indiana University Medical Center.  The moderator was Mary Doyle, Konopka Institute, University of Minnesota.  Please click on the State AH Coordinators menu item to access teleconference materials from the second conference. 

Congratulations to Sion Kim Harris, PhD, Boston LEAH faculty member, for winning the 2006 Young Professional Award from the Maternal and Child Health Section of the American Public Health Association for her significant contributions to research, education, community service, and administration in the field of maternal and child health.

NAHIC and Child Trends announce the release of a new issue brief, "The Family Environment and Adolescent Well-Being: Exposure to Positive and Negative Family Influences." The brief provides data on the influences of parents on their adolescents, addressing issues such as parental monitoring and health behaviors. There is data on teens' experiences in their families with a particular focus on differences across social groups.

The brief is the result of a collaboration between Child Trends and the National Adolescent Health Information Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

The brief is available on the Child Trends web site at http://www.childtrends.org/_pressreleases.cfm?LID=RLS and the NAHIC web site at http://nahic.ucsf.edu/.

Children's Hospital Boston, the University of Minnesota, the University of California at San Francisco, Indiana University Medical Center, and Baylor College of Medicine have contributed lists of publications available in the Documents section of the site. The lists are available in PDF and Word document formats. The lists include the following:

• Peer Reviewed Original Articles
• Non Peer Reviewed Articles
• Books
• Book Chapters
• Monographs/Reports
• Abstracts

The new edition of Knowledge Path: Children with Special Health Care Needs offers a selection of current, high-quality resources about caring for children and adolescents with special health care needs.

Produced by the MCH Library, the knowledge path includes information on (and links to) Web sites, electronic and print publications, databases and online discussion groups for health professionals, policymakers, program administrators, and families. Separate sections list resources on specific aspects of care and development such as adolescent transition, advocacy, financing, and screening. The knowledge path is available at http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/kp_CSHCN.html.

MCH Library knowledge paths on other maternal and child health topics are available at http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/index.html.

The MCH Library welcomes feedback on the usefulness and value of these knowledge paths. A feedback form is available at http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/feedback.html.

A screening instrument that found 29 percent of the students who took it at risk of committing suicide overwhelmed school staffs and led to discontinuance of the survey after two semesters, according to a report in the February 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. That indicates a need for a "simpler, more specific" instrument than the current Suicide Risk Screen, researchers concluded.

That suicides among youths are a source of significant and preventable loss of life is unquestioned, the report points out. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among youths aged 15 to 19 years, accounting for approximately 12 percent of the deaths in this age group. A biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that in 2003, 17 percent of high school students had seriously considered attempting suicide and nearly 9 percent had attempted suicide in the preceding 12 months.

The researchers also agreed that identifying and helping teenagers who have contemplated or may consider suicide is an important school function. "An effective population-based strategy to prevent adolescent suicide should include a school-based approach, given that such an approach is the most efficient way to reach large numbers of young people."

The researchers note that suicide screenings in schools may face "significant resistance" from both high school principals and high school psychologists. Other potential "real world" barriers including insufficient staffing and budgets, scheduling issues, legal concerns, and potential negative responses from parents and students.

Specifically, the researchers examined the Suicide Risk Screen (SRS), a screening instrument embedded in the High School Questionnaire (HSQ), which includes items that assess school deviance and connectedness; peer bonding; family support; emotional issues such as self-esteem, stress, anxiety, hopelessness, and personal control; high-risk behaviors; substance use; suicide; and demographic variables such as age, gender, grade, ethnicity; and family structure. The SRS focuses on sets of rank-ordered criteria based on confirmed suicide risk factors.

The developers of the SRS concede that the instrument may deliver a large number of false positives, but they argue that tolerance of false positives is necessary because of the seriousness of missing a single suicidal individual.

But the very large numbers of students flagged as at risk by the SRS, and the possibility that many of those might in fact be false positives, was the chief difficulty encountered by the two school districts in the research study. School staff were overwhelmed by the need to follow up and counsel more than one-quarter of their students, and they were reluctant to alarm parents by giving them the SRS results, if the findings were incorrect. At the end of the two semesters of the study, both school districts decided they no longer wanted to participate in the suicide screening, and it was dropped from the HSQ and the study.

study was conducted, one young person in each of the two school districts committed suicide. Neither had been participants in the screening program, but researchers noted that the deaths "underscored the seriousness of the problem."

They concluded that: "We believe that the SRS’s low specificity results in too many false positives." Instead, what is needed, they said, is a simplified instrument that identifies only students who have attempted suicide in the past year, who are at high current levels of suicide ideation, or who are at high current levels of depression and exhibit any degree of suicidal ideation.

The report, "Feasibility of Screening Adolescents for Suicide Risk in ‘Real World’ High School Settings," by researchers primarily from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, Chapel Hill, NC, and the University of North Carolina, appeared in the February 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Requests for reprints should be sent to .
 

The Washington Post, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health have released a new comprehensive study looking at how teens and their parents in and around Washington, D.C. view their lives, their priorities and their hopes and dreams for the future.   The survey's findings were featured in a package of articles published in the Oct. 23 Washington Post Magazine.

The survey assesses the views and attitudes of DC-area teens and their parents on priorities involving career, child-rearing and family; their personal hopes and fears; their outlook towards the nation's future; and generational differences in experiences and expectations.  The survey also includes comparative data from a national survey of teens.

The Survey of Teens in the Greater Washington, D.C. Area was conducted among 800 pairs of parents and teenagers in the region, including the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.  Interviews were conducted by telephone between April 26 and May 29, 2005.  Not all questions were asked of parents.  Teenagers were defined as those between 14 and 18 years of age.  The survey also includes additional questions asked of a national sample of 570 teenagers between 14 and 18 years of age. Interviews were conducted by telephone from August 3 to August 8, 2005.

The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University Survey project is a three-way partnership.  The Post, Kaiser, and Harvard worked together to develop survey questionnaires and analyze results. Each organization bears the sole responsibility for the work that appears under its name.

The survey results and a link to the Washington Post articles are available online at http://www.kff.org.

Listservs are great for announcements, discussion groups, and peer to peer support.  As a grantee of the MCHB Training Program, you qualify for free list services through the MCH Training Network.  We will set up one or more lists for your project and provide ongoing technical support.  Are you interested in setting up a listserv as part of your project?  Read more to see how others are using listservs and then contact the helpdesk. 

What is a listserv?

A listserv is a mailing list for email announcements and discussion groups.  It's convenient in that you simply address an email message to one single address and it automatically goes out to the entire group, whether it's 10 people or 10,000. 

Examples: 

You already belong to a listserv.  The MCHB Training Program uses a listserv to send announcements to Training Program grantees, including program updates, resources, grants announcements and more. 

The Pediatric Pulmonary Centers collaborated on a group web site and an array of listservs to facilitate group communication and collaboration. 

Here's what Dave Younutas of the PPC group has to say: 

"The Pediatric Pulmonary Centers have found the listserv to be particularly valuable. As the list administrator, I have found that the various disciplines, standing committees and ad hoc committees make extensive use of the listserv to communicate with each other.  Recently, all seven centers collaborated on the development of an acronym list that is nearly completed - entirely through the listserv.  The structure of the listserv allows discipline specific, committee specific and global dissemination of information between the seven centers. The Institute for Child Health Policy provides this service free of charge - I cannot envision of how we could function as efficiently without it."

Sometimes when a lists get popular, the membership count will start to take off!  The largest list we host currently has 2293 members and growing every day.  The topic is Health Care Transition and is moderated by John Reiss, Ph.D of the Institute for Child Health Policy, University of Florida.

"The popularity of this list was unexpected.  Initially we expected the list to be a discussion group, but it has evolved into more of an information dissemination vehicle.  Health care transition is becoming recognized as an important issue, but I have to admit that I was very surprised, and very pleased to see how quickly this list has grown in membership.  The list is moderated and set to digest mode, this way, subscribers get one single message per interval (usually about once per week) and each messages is edited to keep announcements brief.  Readers are usually directed to an original resource if they want to learn more." 

Can you envision how a listserv could be used as part of your training project? 

If you'd like to start a listserv for your project, contact the helpdesk.