Maternal and Child Health Library

This and past issues of the MCH Alert are available at http://www.mchlibrary.info/alert/archives.html

July 2, 2010

1. GUIDE SHARES STRATEGIES FOR WRITING AND DESIGNING HEALTH WEB SITES

Health Literacy Online: A Guide to Writing and Designing Easy-to-Use Health Web Sites is designed to help public health communication professionals create Web sites and Web content for individuals with limited literacy skills and limited experience using the Web. The guide, written by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, contains strategies, actions, testing methods, and resources to improve the online experience for all users. Topics include delivering online health information that is actionable and engaging, creating a health Web site that is easy to use, and evaluating and improving a health Web site with user-centered design. The guide is available at http://www.health.gov/healthliteracyonline

• Among participants, 21.5 percent reported carrying a weapon in the past month; of these, 35.2 percent carried a gun or a gun with another weapon. Weapon-carrying increased with age, from 8.9 percent at age 9 to 38.3 percent at age 15, and more males (57.6 percent) than females carried a weapon.
• One risk factor (substance use) and two protective factors (school connectedness and peer prosocial behavior norms) were significantly associated with weapon-carrying.
• Among adolescents with the two protective factors and no risk factor, 4 percent would be expected to carry a weapon.
• The likelihood of carrying a weapon increased almost six-fold (to 25 percent) as the risk factor was added to the model with the two protective factors still in the model.
• With no risk factor in the profile, a reduction in protective factors raised the probability of weapon-carrying from 4 percent to 31 percent. Likewise, for adolescents with fewer protective factors and the risk factor, probabilities of weapon-carrying increased from 25 percent to 80 percent.
• For adolescents with no protective factors and no risk factor, the probability of weapon-carrying was 31 percent -- almost eight times the percentage for those with two protective factors and no risk factor (4 percent).

• In 2007, 7.6 percent of U.S. children lived in households where someone smoked inside the home. This prevalence varied from a low of 1.1 percent for Utah to a high of 17.9 percent for West Virginia.
• Adjustment for socioeconomic factors reduced geographic disparities. Specifically, children in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia had 12 times higher odds of being exposed to secondhand smoke than children in Utah, and those in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Missouri, and Wisconsin had 10 times higher odds.

• Non-Hispanic white, black, American-Indian, and mixed-race children had 2.0 to 2.6 times higher odds of being exposed to secondhand smoke at home than Hispanic children.
• Children from families with incomes below the federal poverty level (FPL) had 7.3 times higher adjusted odds of being exposed to secondhand smoke at home than children from families with incomes at 400 percent of the FPL or greater.
• Children whose parents had less than 12 years of education had 10.6 times higher adjusted odds of being exposed than children whose parents had college degrees.
• Children from English-speaking households had 4.1 times higher odds of being exposed than children from non-English-speaking households.

• While there is variability across regions, characteristics of rural oral health delivery systems include limited access to preventive public health services, fewer oral health professionals (generalists as well as specialists) per population than in urban areas, larger proportions of the population without insurance or adequate income to access oral health services, and more time and resources required to bridge the geographic distances between populations and needed services.

• Involving mass prevention or public health interventions such as increasing water fluoridation and providing oral health education, caries risk assessment and referral, and preventive services.
• Offering behavioral health services for adults.
• Training more health professionals prepared to work in rural areas. Examples include recruiting students from rural areas, creating education partnerships in rural locations, and providing loan repayment and scholarships.
• Increasing the flexibility and capacity of the oral health work force by promoting new roles for existing health professionals (permitting greater dental hygienist autonomy, involving medical professionals in oral health care) and creating new types of health professionals (dental health aid therapists, dental therapists).
• Overcoming distance barriers by providing mobile clinics and offering telehealth for diagnosis, consultation, and continuing education.