News

This report from the SAMHSA-HRSA Center for Integrated Health Solutions lays out the clear need for HIV treatment providers to jointly address behavioral health concerns and HIV, starting with screening for mental health and substance use disorders. The Case for Behavioral Health Screening in HIV Care Settings offers strategies for providers to implement screening practices, including tips for preparing staff, updating organizational culture and enhancing organizational infrastructure.

Read the full report from SAMHSA-HRSA CIHS.

Children as young as 13 can be tried in adult criminal court for serious crimes in New York state. But instead of redirecting troubled kids, prison hardens them. That’s why the New York Foundling, a private children’s-advocacy organization, offers an alternative, Families Rising, a diversionary option that mandates family therapy in exchange for delayed sentencing and avoiding a criminal record entirely if the program is completed successfully. The program also costs significantly less than housing an inmate at New York City’s Rikers Island: $8,400 versus $167,731. To date, participants have also proved the experiment’s validity: Of the Families Rising participants, 97 percent completed the program and avoided a criminal record; 92 percent completed the program and avoided jail time altogether.

Families Rising operates from the belief that most children are products of their environments. “A child who is arrested and tried as an adult should not be viewed in isolation or a vacuum,” according to their website. “Instead, we view the child in the context of his or her family, and introduce a trained therapist into the family dynamic to help them address factors leading to their arrest.” Formally called “functional family therapy,” the practice can be intensive for all members of the family—especially parents, who are often under extreme pressure to make sure the prescribed therapy is successful, lest their son or daughter be taken into custody.

Read the full article on TheAtlantic.com.

The following is an excerpt from an article on Kaiser Health News by Sarah Varney:

Patients like the Houston man are health care’s so-called “super-utilizers”— people with complex problems who frequent emergency rooms for ailments more aptly handled by primary care doctors and social workers. They cost public and private insurers dearly — making up just five percent of the U.S. population, but accounting for 50 percent of health care spending.

As health care costs continue to rise, hospitals and doctors are trying to figure out how to find these patients and get to the root of their problems.

An effort to do just that started in New Jersey’s poorest city, Camden, more than a decade ago. Inspired by the way police departments mapped crime data to detect “hot spots,” family physician Dr. Jeffrey Brenner dug into ambulance records and emergency department data to show how high-cost patients were shuttling between city hospitals.

“In America, we’re medicalizing social problems and we’re criminalizing social problems, and we’re wasting huge amounts of public resources,” Brenner said. “We have the wrong tools to solve the wrong problem.”

To steer patients away from expensive emergency care and push health systems to change the way they do business, the Affordable Care Act funds programs called Accountable Care Organizations. These are networks of hospitals, physicians and others who team up to improve care, lower costs and reap the savings.

This high touch, data-driven approach has yielded big savings. ER visits for the first group of patients dropped by 40 percent, cutting monthly hospital bills from $1.2 million dollars to $500,000.

Read the full article on KHN.org.

The HHS Office of Minority Health Youth Health Equity Model of Practice (YHEMOP), provides Health Equity Fellowships to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students interested in a career in health. These fellowships provide hands on, “in the field” learning opportunities through short-term placements in diverse organizations or institutions that promote health equity and/or addresses health disparities. Fellowship sites include but are not limited to government agencies, healthcare delivery organizations and systems, public health organizations, health equity councils, and other institutions that promote health equity and/or address health disparities. Applications are due by February 15, 2017.

Read more about the program.

Growing up in poverty exposes children to greater levels of stress, which can lead to psychological problems later in life, a new study suggests. Researchers at Cornell University reported that kids who grow up poor are more likely to have reduced short-term spatial memory. The study also reported that such kids seem to be more prone to antisocial and aggressive behavior, such as bullying.

Poor children are also more likely than kids from middle-income homes to feel powerless, the study authors suggested. Of course, the findings don’t mean that all children growing up in poverty will have these problems, only that the risk is higher, the researchers said. “What this means is, if you’re born poor, you’re on a trajectory to have more of these kinds of psychological problems,” study author Gary Evans, a professor of environmental and developmental psychology, said in a university news release.

The researchers said the negative psychological effects of growing up in poverty may stem from stress. “With poverty, you’re exposed to lots of stress. Everybody has stress, but low-income families, low-income children, have a lot more of it,” Evans said. “And the parents are also under a lot of stress. So, for kids, there is a cumulative risk exposure.”

For the study, the researchers monitored 341 children and young adults for 15 years. The participants were evaluated at four intervals: age 9, 13, 17 and 24. The young people’s short-term spatial memory was tested by asking the older participants to correctly repeat a series of complex sequences of lights and sounds by pressing four colored pads in a certain order.

Those who grew up in poverty were not able to perform this task as well as those from middle-income backgrounds. “This is an important result because the ability to retain information in short-term memory is fundamental to a host of basic cognitive skills, including language and achievement,” the study authors wrote.

Read more on BismarckTribune.com. Read the abstract of the study.

National Drug and Alcohol Facts Week® links students with scientists and other experts to counteract the myths about drugs and alcohol that teens get from the internet, social media, TV, movies, music, or from friends. It was launched in 2010 by scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to stimulate educational events in communities so teens can learn what science has taught us about drug use and addiction. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism became a partner starting in 2016, and alcohol has been added as a topic area for the week. NIDA and NIAAA are part of the National Institutes of Health.

NIDA’s online guide gives you everything you need to plan, promote, and host your NDAFW event.

Read more on Teens.DrugAbuse.org.