Even for employed problem drinkers who are not abusing drugs and who have no serious medical problems, an initial referral to AA alone or a choice of programs, although less costly than inpatient care, involves more risk than compulsory inpatient treatment and should be accompanied by close monitoring for signs of incipient relapse.
The "second public health revolution" targets factors in the environment, together with lifestyle, to prevent illness and untimely death. Yet the growth of the "wellness movement" has driven a wedge between public health advocates who argue for environmental solutions and those whose major focus is individual behavior. This tension is nowhere more evident than in the workplace, where the new wellness professionals are at odds with specialists in occupational health and industrial hygiene. This paper reports findings from a cross-sectional survey of a sizeable sample of workers at six New England facilities of a very large American manufacturing firm, assessing their perceptions of risk in the two domains: environmental exposures and lifestyle risks. Multiple regression analyses reveal that both job risks and life risks are associated with a variety of potentially costly and disruptive health problems, even after controlling for demographic and occupational factors. This analysis suggests that wellness programs in the workplace will be more effective if they integrate environmental protection with efforts to reduce lifestyle risk.
Demonstrating Excellence in Practice-based Teaching for Public Health is a report intended to provide a resource for practice-based teaching of public health and includes a brief explanation of terms and practices, as well as suggestions on methodologies for implementation. No comparable resource currently exists that assists faculty and practice partners to recognize, implement, and promote practice-based teaching. This article summarizes findings from the report, including an explanation of practice-based teaching, its guiding principles, practical approaches, and recommendations on sustaining and advancing partnerships for professional public health education and training.
A B S T R A C TJuvenile justice systems in the United States do not always respond effectively to substance abuse problems among young offenders. In 2002, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched a 10-community demonstration project to address this problem. Reclaiming Futures (RF) relies on community partnerships to improve treatment quality, strengthen local leadership, expand inter-organizational collaboration, and create systems of shared performance management. The initial findings of a cross-site evaluation suggest that Reclaiming Futures is yielding important and positive change. Bi-annual surveys of key informants measure the quality and integration of juvenile justice and substance abuse treatment systems in each community. Of 13 indices measured by the surveys, 11 showed significant improvements between 2003 and 2005. Laura Burney Nissen, Ph.D., M.S.W., National Program Director of Reclaiming Futures in Portland, Oregon, has spent the last 16 years as an advocate, researcher, and developer of strength-based service delivery systems for youths in a wide variety of treatment and juvenile justice settings. A founder of the Center for High
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.