Title: WFCs CAT Public Health Project
Author:
Section/SPIG: Chiropractic Health Care
Issue Date:
For several years the World Federation of Chiropractic (WFC) has been an international association of national associations, with the chiropractic associations of over 80 nations as its members. The WFC has also been accepted and designated as a non-governmental organization officially affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO). A few years ago the WFC appointed a committee called the Health for All Committee and charged it with the responsibility for coordinating WFC's international public health projects with those of WHO. The members of the Health for All Committee and the WFC regions they represent are:
· Rand Baird, DC,MPH--- Chairperson
· Evalie Heath, DC --- Africa
· Bruce Vaughan, DC --- Asia
· Efstathios Papadopoulos, DC --- Eastern Mediterranean
· Anthony Metcalfe, DC --- Europe
· Sira Borges, DC,MD --- Latin America
· Deborah Kopansky-Giles, DC --- North America
· Inger Villadsen, DC --- Pacific
· Gary Auerbach, DC --- North America
· David Chapman-Smith, ex officio
In addition Drs. David Koch and Medhat Alattar of Palmer and Palmer---Florida serve as resource advisors to the committee.
Although it has many health initiatives and projects and programs WHO's number-one cabinet-level health priority for the past few years has been its Tobacco Free Initiative which includes its widely publicized Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The WFC is generally supportive of many WHO projects, and some have clear chiropractic applications (nutrition, exercise, obesity, etc.), but with limited resources the WFC has chosen to direct the Health for All Committee to coordinate and concentrate its efforts on WHO's anti-tobacco use efforts. To that end, the Health for All Committee recommended tobacco policies adopted by the WFC at its international congress in 2003 and developed some anti-tobacco materials for use by DCs in their own offices. The Health for All Committee has named their project CAT (Chiropractors Against Tobacco), and the CAT materials including office brochures and instruction sheets, colorful high-impact posters, and questions to ask during new patient histories can all be easily downloaded from the WFC Web site and printed on a color printer or taken as a computer file to a printer for printing in quantity.
As part of its ongoing work, a pilot study of the usefulness and acceptance of these CAT materials is being undertaken now as a collaborative effort of the WFC, the APHA Chiropractic Health Care Section, and the research departments of Parker and Palmer Colleges of Chiropractic with Dr. Cheryl Hawk as the principal investigator. A select group of chiropractic offices with prior experience in practice-based research was solicited and almost immediately 30 offices eagerly volunteered to participate and began receiving training materials in April. Although small in scale this important pilot study will help validate the materials and also could possibly lead to a larger scale study. Check out the WFC Web site at <www.wfc.org> to sample the materials.