JPHMP Direct

Recommendations from the Jan/Feb 2018 Issue

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by Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS

As those of us on the east coast begin to dig out from the fallout of the “bomb cyclone” (aka, Tropical Storm Grayson), I would like to bring your attention to a few articles from the recent January/February issue of the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice that you might have missed. The first, “Poorly Controlled Diabetes in New York City: Mapping High-Density Neighborhoods,” by Wu, Jiang, and Di Lonardo, reports on efforts to identify geographic areas in New York City that can be targeted for the delivery of glycemic control efforts. During this process, the authors created a series of maps depicting density of New York residents with poor glycemic control, which indicated high densities of individuals with poor glycemic control in the boroughs of Flatbush, East Harlem, Washington Heights/Inwood, and the South Bronx. Remarkably, these clusters accounted for more than 10% of New York residents with poor glycemic control, despite covering less than 2% of the habitable land mass. The methods reported in this article could prove to be a useful tool for municipalities seeking to identify geographic and demographic targets for diabetes prevention and control programs.

The second article of interest comes from Tracy Thomas and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) entitled “Applying Instructional Design Strategies and Behavior Theory to Household Disaster Preparedness Training.” In this article, they describe the development and evaluation of an intervention (Ready CDC) designed to increase household disaster preparedness among the CDC workforce. This intervention, which utilized instructional design strategies and the Stages of Change (ie, Transtheoretical) Model, showed impressive results with 44% of participants who were not initially in the “maintenance” phase progressing one stage or more for developing a written disaster plan. Their results have implications for the development of similar plans and suggest that individual tailoring based upon their stage of readiness is a promising strategy for improving the effectiveness of disaster preparedness training.

Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS, FACSM, is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice and an Associate Professor in the Department of Implementation Science of the Wake Forest School of Medicine at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC, USA. Follow him at Twitter and Instagram. [Full Bio]

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