Greetings ICEHS members and friends,

Health disparities are prominent in many areas of public health including injury, violence, emergency health services and emergency preparedness. There is an upcoming opportunity to highlight efforts to reduce these disparities through National Public Health Week (NPHW), April 6-12. This year’s NPHW is geared to building the foundation for a healthy America. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of APHA, reports that “Our national is falling behind in many important measures of what it means to be healthy.” APHA developed a toolkit for use by members and partners in their outreach endeavors to remedy this. You can obtain a copy of this toolkit at: http://www.nphw.org/nphw09/default.htm.

We urge you to use the tool kit to call attention to injury and violence prevention issues in your communities and state during this week.

Watch for your upcoming February issue of The Nation’s Health --  the official newspaper of APHA. It contains the congressional voting records of your senators and representatives on health issues. APHA reports that the proportion of representatives voting in support of key public health issues improved over the previous year. In particular, issues included the federal budget resolution, Medicare improvement bill, children’s health insurance, Medicaid rules, tobacco regulation, mental health parity legislation and others. We thank the scores of ICEHS members who took the time to let their representatives know how important these issues were to the health of the American public. There are several key issues coming up in 2009 that will have a direct impact on injury and emergency health services so we invite ICEHS members to stay tuned and be prepared to urge their representatives to vote to “build a foundation for a healthy America.” If you are not receiving The Nation’s Health, log on to APHA to check your individual membership status to verify that it is up-to-date.

If you are interested in working on injury and violence policy and in reviewing existing policies for their continued applicability and compatibility with the latest scientific discoveries, please be in touch with Kathleen Carlson (ferg0114@umn.edu). Kathleen is tracking and disseminating committee membership for all ICEHS committees. 

If you are planning to attend the Annual Meeting of the World Federation of Public Health Associations in Instanbul in April 2009, join ICEHS members for the last day of the conference for what is shaping up to be an exciting session on injury and violence. Drop me an e-mail at jp376@columbia.edu if you are planning on attending and would like to be invited to a mid-year ICEHS dinner.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Joyce Pressley, PhD, MPH

Chair, ICEHS