2021 Annual Conference

Sandro Galea, a physician, epidemiologist, and author, is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature, and is a regular contributor to a range of public media, about the social causes of health, mental health, and the consequences of trauma. He has been listed as one of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences. He is chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Galea has received several lifetime achievement awards. Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto, graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow.

Learn how to improve the health of your community through partnerships

Come check out the new data products on EnviroHealthLink.org for Spring 2020! EnviroHealthLink.org is your one-stop-shop for Kentucky health data and we are constantly updating and creating new data products to meet your needs. Come see what new, easy-to-use data products are available to you!

Have you ever wondered how laws and policies related to your profession are created? If so, then this session is for you. This presentation will provide participants with a basic understanding of the legislative process and how statutes impact the regulatory process.

We all want to live lives that matter, but just how do we make a positive difference? Some believe that you must have an impressive title to do so, but that is a mistake. Everyone can be a leader and this highly engaging session breaks leadership down into four simple components: A heart that cares, a head that connects, hands that collaborate, and feet that show courage.

For the past two decades, Big Tobacco has spent an average of $372,000,000 every year on marketing tobacco products to Kentuckians. Learn how the Department for Public Health’s Tobacco Prevention & Cessation Program uses its own communications strategies to combat industry marketing, help Kentuckians quit tobacco, and ensure fewer young people ever use tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.

Practical, measurable, and achievable tools and methods to revitalize public health administrative practices, from leaders to line-level staff. Executive and administrative assistants are the primary audience, but all interested in improving public health administration are welcome.

Public Health Transformation (PHT) was originally introduced in 2019 primarily as a means to provide direction for Kentucky’s local health departments to streamline services; and thus, cut expenses. The urgency for PHT was caused by Kentucky’s Employee Pension crisis which had the potential to render many of the state’s local health departments financially insolvent in a matter of months. This presentation will provide an overview of the original initiatives and the systematic process to relaunch PHT as an organized and collective effort to assess and propose changes to the public health system at both the state and local level.

Julie Sweetland is a sociolinguist and serves as a Senior Advisor at the FrameWorks Institute, where she leads efforts to diffuse the organization’s cutting-edge, evidence-based reframing recommendations throughout the nonprofit sector. Since joining FrameWorks in 2012, she has led the development of powerful learning experiences for nonprofit leaders and has provided strategic communications guidance for advocates, policymakers, and scientists nationwide and internationally. Prior to joining FrameWorks, Julie was actively involved in improving teaching and learning for over a decade as a classroom teacher, instructional designer, and teacher educator. At Center for Inspired Teaching, she served as director of teaching and learning and helped to found a demonstration school with an embedded teacher residency. As founding director of the Center for Urban Education, she launched a graduate teacher preparation program for the University of the District of Columbia. Julie’s linguistic research has focused on the intersection of language and race; on the role of language variation and language attitudes on student learning; and on effective professional learning for teachers. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Educational Researcher, and Education Week, and she is the co-author of African American, Creole, and Other Vernacular Englishes in Education. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and lectures regularly at her alma mater. She completed her MA and PhD in linguistics at Stanford University.

Looking for ways to improve your grant writing? Thoughtfully incorporating data into grant applications and designing evaluation plans with data in mind are easy ways to improve your grant writing. Learn about the importance of using data and evaluation in your grant applications and where to find lots of Kentucky data all in one place, EnviroHealthLink.org.

Learn how to adapt the community health assessment process to ensure community participation in the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Kaye Bender is an independent public health, organizational, and education consultant and strategist and the owner of Kaye Bender Consulting, LLC. She was appointed as the Executive Director of the Mississippi Public Health Association in May 2020. She was the President and CEO of the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) from 2009-2019. She was the Dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Nursing for 6 years immediately before PHAB. Prior to that, she worked in local public health for several years in Mississippi and was the Deputy State Health Officer for the Mississippi Department of Health for 12 years. She chaired the Exploring Accreditation Steering Committee, the precursor study for the establishment of the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB).

She is a board member of the National Board of Public Health Examiners; the Public Health Foundation; and the MS Public Health Institute. She is an active member of the American Academy of Nursing and served on its board from 2016-2019. She has numerous publications and presentations related to governmental public health infrastructure improvement.

This session covers the various codes of ethics that apply to the Executive Branch of state government and an overview of local ethics codes, as well as a review of the ethics provisions contained in the Model Procurement Code.

The Local Lens is a brand new podcast from the Powell County Health Department where we dive into our community’s experience with the drug epidemic. Everyone in the community has a different vantage point of what the drug issue looks like, shaped by their personal lives and professional roles. In this show, we are showcasing as many of those perspectives as we can through honest and informative conversations. By broadcasting the conversations to nearly everyone in the county and beyond, we hope to reduce stigma and begin to find solutions. These are our people, using our voices, telling our stories, because no one sees it like we do.

The Kentucky COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index (CCVI) is an online mapping tool that allows state and local public health officials to access information regarding COVID-19 risk and social vulnerability at the subcounty level to inform strategies and drive equitable resource allocation decisions within the state of Kentucky.

From coffin clubs to downloading apps like WeCroak, a growing number of people are living their best life by embracing death. This session explores the value of a community-centered deathcare approach to build strong, resilient, communities.

According to the CDC, Kentucky has one of the highest rates of antibiotic prescribing in the nation. After this presentation, you will be equipped to join statewide efforts to combat inappropriate prescribing by providing community education on antibiotic awareness.

In April 2020, a team of researchers from the University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences (UofL SPHIS) and Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness (LMPHW) was formed to project the trends in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The team later collaborated with the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) to project the COVID-19 trends for regions of the Kentucky Regional Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP) Coalition. The team’s research aims to inform local public health preparedness efforts on a regular basis and assess the impact of considered, proposed, and implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions. In this session, the essentials of the development of such a model (the inter-agency collaboration, data requirements, and interdisciplinary research team) will be discussed. Also, selected results of the team’s projections will be presented.

This session will focus the transmission of COVID-19 and how it differed between rural and urban counties, and how policy and intervention measures have impacted the transmission.

Communities are like lakes and rivers; they are all different and programs that work well in one may not work well in another. Preventing substance use and reducing drug overdose events is much like fishing. To catch a fish, an angler has to persuade the fish to take the bait. This presentation describes our drug overdose prevention Tackle Box.

Would you like to connect your patients or clients who suffer from substance use disorders to available treatment options in their moment or readiness? Attend this session to learn how Kentucky became a front-runner in substance use disorder treatment coordination. Watch how this near real-time substance use disorder facility locator website connects those in need with available resources using more than 30 filter options, including payment type, type of treatment, and location. Best of all, take home strategies that you can implement in your own community. Join us as we walk through the continuum of substance use disorder treatment.

WellCare Health Plans and the Community Farmers Market in Bowling Green, KY began partnering in 2014, working to increase healthy food access. This partnership grew in 2018 with the creation of a new program, focused on mothers to be on Medicaid: Fresh Rx for MOMs. WellCare provided the initial funding for incentives and now this grassroots program is growing to other communities, after being awarded a nearly $500,000 grant to expand. Come ready to learn about how partnerships make all the difference in transforming our communities locally.

2020 has impacted all of us and one group that we focus on in this session are our educators. The pandemic has highlighted the need to support educator wellness to improve the school health climate and student success.

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At times, data-driven efforts fail to meaningfully address persistent trends in adverse outcomes due to a lack of data that support an intersectional approach to maternal health issues. This session will include discussions of two studies that take an intersectional approach to adverse maternal health outcomes in Kentucky.

Using data, collaboration, and a focus on the environments in which children develop, the country of Iceland took its rates of youth substance use from being among the highest in Europe to the lowest in several categories in just 15 years. Learn how Franklin County’s Just Say Yes coalition is adapting the Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM) to fit a Kentucky context. Presented by Just Say Yes staff and preeminent IPM researcher Alfgeir Kristjansson.

Due to unclear and emerging guidance, some mothers who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were separated from their newborns immediately following birth and were not given the opportunity to have their newborn room-in, breastfeed, and begin the bonding process. Because separating moms from newborn can lead to bonding issues and impact breastfeeding, but keeping a positive mom with an infant may result in infant infections, the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness partnered with a local birthing hospital to interview Latinx mothers in order to better understand their experiences with newborn separations. This session will address how local health departments can partner with local providers to develop more equitable, evidence-based care for mothers during times of crisis like the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Mistrust of the healthcare system often causes marginalized populations not receive the care they need due to feeling intimidated or misunderstood. WellCare Health Plans and Educate, Encourage, Respect of Northern Kentucky have collaboratively teamed up with other community partners to bring a host of services to families in the community.

Using a facial mask can considerably reduce the transmission of COVID-19 in the community. Therefore, assessing the prevalence of mask use and understanding potential disparities and trends in mask-wearing behavior can inform local public health interventions and policies. Nonetheless, reliable assessments of residents’ mask-wearing practices are scarce. The available assessments are either based on self-report (hence suffer from attenuation bias) or focus specific sub-populations (and are non-representative). Observational studies that are based on random sampling can provide an accurate assessment of mask-wearing practices in the community. This session presents the results of three waves of such studies in Jefferson County, KY.

Imagine if you had to bring your own toilet paper to school with you? Then, imagine the act of carrying toilet paper into the bathroom with you was stigmatized. If you are a person who menstruates, you might have guessed what I'm hinting at- tampons, pads, cups- oh my! This presentation dives into the lack of availability of menstrual hygiene products on a Kentucky regional college campus.

Kentucky's hemp pilot program started in 2014 and has seen many changes in a few short years. This complex plant and start-up industry continues to evolve and generates new challenges at every turn. What's new with hemp and hemp product regulation in Kentucky? How do we separate hemp from marijuana?

In many high-risk, high-stress industries, resilience is typically thought of on the individual level, and workforce employees are encouraged to engage in individual strategies for self-care and resilience. We take a different approach and instead discuss resilience as a property of the system itself. We propose that resilience can be built on an organizational level by promoting a culture of safety within the system; we describe tools for doing so within the high-stress, safety critical field of child welfare.

More than five thousand workers lost their lives in 2018 due to occupational incidents. Research suggests that increased job control and safety citizenship can help mitigate occupational incidents. Occupational incident prevention requires employees to report near misses and minor injuries. This presentation reviews which of the six subdimensions of safety citizenship are promoters of occupational injury reporting.

Can the utilization of specific social media platforms, such as Tik Tok to create a community in which individuals recovering from Eating disorders gain social support? Tik Tok has been a growing platform in younger age groups, so learning how to use these platforms to facilitate successful recovery and destigmatization of Eating Disorders.

Team Ultra is an afterschool physical fitness, nutrition education and character building program. Beginning as a running club in one elementary school, Team Ultra now operates in all six elementary schools within Marshall County and was recently piloted at North Marshall Middle. WellCare Health Plans and the Marshall County Health Department have partnered together since 2014, expanding the scope and reach of programming. The session will highlight partnership, programming and outcomes.