CALL FOR ABSTRACTS — 140th APHA Annual Meeting

Theme: Prevention and Wellness Across the Lifespan

Public Health Education and Health Promotion

Submission Deadline: Monday, April 30, 2012

• Addressing Health Disparities through Health Promotion Initiatives
  Seeking abstracts of programs that address the preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations. 
• Advocacy Initiatives
  Advocacy is a critical competency for health educators and an essential strategy in profession-wide efforts to foster improvements in individual and population health in all settings. This session seeks abstracts pertaining to building effective political alliances with policymakers to strengthen and expand the resource base for behavioral/social sciences research, health education programs and practice, professional preparation in health education, and public health workforce employment.
• Apps for health education and wellness promotion (Organized jointly with HIIT)
  If there's an app for that, we want your abstract.  Seeking abstracts that demonstrate the successful use of mobile technologies to promote health and wellness initiatives.
• Baby Boomers: How will they affect the public health infrastructure in the coming years?
  The health issues associated with the Baby Boomer population is set to be one of the next great public health issues.  This session seeks abstracts related to this aging population, including those that address aging in place, Alzheimer’s, walkability for seniors
• Breastfeeding (Organized jointly with Breastfeeding)
  Breastfeeding provides the optimal healthy beginning for newborns and mothers. In addition to having a protective effect against numerous acute and chronic illnesses, breastfeeding fosters family bonding, social development, and is environmentally and economically responsible. This session seeks abstracts of successful strategies/interventions to increase breastfeeding initiation and duration as well as those that facilitate awareness and support of breastfeeding across societal settings.
• Built Environment
  The built environment affects the health of communities in multiple ways . Creation of or enhancing access to places for healthful behaviors involves the efforts of worksites, coalitions, agencies, and communities as they attempt to change the local environment to create and promote opportunities for physical activity. Such changes include creating walking trails, building exercise facilities, or providing access to existing nearby facilities. This session seeks abstracts of successful programs/initiatives that have improved opportunities for physical activity within their communities.
• Cancer communication: Prevention and survivorship (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on communication programs and initiatives that span the cancer care continuum—screening to diagnosis, treatment, relapse, survivorship, and end-of-life care
• Cancer prevention and screening in risk populations
  Although cancer death rates are declining in the US, cancer remains a major public health issue, especially in risk populations where this decline is not being observed. This session seeks abstracts for programs/interventions that have effectively reached at-risk populations for screening and other preventive services.
• Changing Health Behavior in Children, Adolescents, and Teens (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on prevention and wellness  across various life stages, including health and wellness among children, adolescents, and teens.
• College Health Initiatives
  Seeking abstracts that demonstrate novel approaches that encourage health promoting/protecting behaviors and/or reduce risk/harm among college students.
• Community and lay health workers: Building public health capacity
  Community/lay health workers serve an important role in reaching and teaching various disadvantaged and often hard-to-reach populations. This session seeks abstracts for projects that have effectively utilized community/lay health workers to help build public health capacity within their communities. Abstracts should emphasize best practices, challenges, and achievements.
• Creative initiatives for using Healthy People 2020 to build healthy communities (Organized Jointly with CHPPD)
  The Community Health Planning & Policy Development and Public Health Education & Health Promotion Sections are collaborating on a session which would include abstracts focusing on community-based participatory projects, public health policy development and health educational initiatives that have utilized indicators of Healthy People 2020 to achieve documented success and progress in improving the health of communities.   Abstracts submitted for consideration will be reviewed and selected by both Sections.
• Cross-cultural health communication (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on communication campaigns, initiatives, or programs that target immigrant, multinational, or other culturally distinct audiences.
• Culture and language: Best practices in health education and promotion:
  Health education, promotion, and communication activities are most salient to the intended recipients when they are culturally and linguistically appropriate. This session seeks abstracts of programs that demonstrate best practices and strategies to improve the health and lives of diverse at-risk populations through culturally and linguistically tailored approaches
• Delivering Long Term Care in an Aging Society
  Long term care (LTC) involves a continuum of services designed to maintain the maximum functional independence of a primary aged clientele. Demographic and economic forces continue to apply pressure to the resource constrained LTC system. This session will explore innovative methods to promoting the health of the millions of aged Americans currently dependent upon long term care services to address their health and functional needs. Abstracts addressing client satisfaction with services, innovative quality improvement initiatives, policy implications, and disparities within the long term care system, among other related topics, would be pertinent to this session.
• Diabetes prevention & control:
  Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. Almost 24 million Americans have diabetes, including 5.7 million who don’t know they have the disease. This session seeks abstracts for disease management programs and self-management educational interventions designed to improve glycemic control and prevent co-morbid conditions.
• Emerging Theories in Health Education, Promotion, and Communication
  Seeking abstracts that explore new, emerging paradigms at the individual, community and ecological levels that could potentially transform the basis for future health education planning, communications and interventions.
• Engaging communities in research: Best practices
  Participatory models of research, in which communities are actively engaged in the research process through partnerships with academic institutions and/or other trained experts, are central to the national prevention research agenda. This session focuses on research projects that utilize community-based participatory research (CBPR) or other frameworks to ensure community engagement in research planning and processes. This session seeks abstracts that focus on effective methods of engaging community members, research designs, and/or evaluation of community engagement success
• Evaluation: Methods for measuring impact and outcome of public health programs
  Evaluation is an integral part of planning and implementing public health initiatives. It is, however, often neglected, especially during the initial planning phases, thus limiting its effectiveness of determining an initiative’s value. This session seeks abstracts that focus on evaluation methodologies that have been used to show impact and outcome of public health initiatives.
• Family caregiver: An important player of public health.
  There are over 65 million Americans who care for loved ones with a chronic illness or disability or the frailties of old age. It is estimated that their care is worth $257 billion per year. However, the time and energy burden can be enormous to caregivers, which may at the cost of their own health. This session seeks abstracts that characterize and address the needs of family caregivers. 
• Health communication in special populations (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on initiatives, programs, and communication within unique communities, populations, and environments.
• Health literacy issues across the lifespan (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on literacy issues facing individuals, families, and health care providers, including, evaluations of barriers and challenges to literacy at various life stages.
• Health promotion for persons with all abilities (Organized jointly with Disabilities)
  People with all abilities can benefit from participating in health promotion activities or receiving health promotion messages.  Yet, physical, social and other contextual barriers frequently make persons with disabilities to access such activities and messages.  This session seeks to address various health promotion strategies/activities that target people with all abilities including those with a disability.
• Income Inequalities
  There has been a great deal of research comparing income inequality between U.S. states, cities and counties and between countries showing that where income inequality is greatest health and social problems, including obesity, mental illness, homicide, life expectancy, infant mortality and other measures are the worst. This session seeks abstract submissions about: a) health education and promotion interventions that address this issue, including through policy, and b) research on income inequality and health that suggests proposals for health education and promotion interventions.
• Mass media influences on health behavior (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on how traditional and mass media—television, radio, newspapers, large-scale Web sites—influence and affect individuals’ health behaviors.
• Mental Health
  In the United States, 57.7 million people have diagnosable mental disorders, including about one in four adults. This session seeks abstracts for health education, promotion, and/or communication programs/interventions that address mental health issues including screening and management of depressive disorders and other mental disorders; depression and mental health care management in home, clinic, and community settings; etc.
• Mobile health applications to promote adherence with health regimens (Organized jointly with HIIT)
  Seeking abstracts demonstrating successful use of mobile technologies that assist people in adhering to medications and other medical regimes.
• Obesity and Overweight
  Overweight and obesity have been shown to increase the likelihood of certain diseases and other health problems, and are important concerns for adults, children, and adolescents in the United States. An estimated 26.7 percent of adults in the United States reported being obese in 2009, up 1.1 percentage points since 2007. This session seeks abstracts of interventions that influence weight-related behaviors and outcomes in individuals or groups through use of technology, including: Computers (e.g., internet, CD-ROM, e-mail, kiosk, computer program); video conferencing; personal digital assistants; pagers; pedometers with computer interaction; computerized telephone system interventions that target physical activity, nutrition, or weight; etc.
• Online health communities for patients, providers, and caregivers (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on open and closed online communities where patients, providers, caregivers, or other stakeholders meet to discuss specific illnesses or health topics.
• Online, social, and mobile media initiatives (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on the evaluation of online, social media, and mobile media initiatives for promoting healthy behavior or delivering health care.
• Oral Health Promotion, Health Communications and Social Media (Organized jointly with Oral Health)
  Good oral health is integral to general health and well-being. Most oral diseases and injuries that affect health and well-being throughout life are preventable, yet the burden of these oral problems is extensive and particularly severe in vulnerable populations. This session seeks abstracts that demonstrate effective use of health promotion strategies aimed at preventing/reducing burden from oral diseases (eg., dental caries, oral and pharyngeal cancers, etc.) and injuries, including those that are administered by practitioners and delivered in groups settings (eg., schools, community-wide, worksite, etc.)
• PHEHP Materials Contest
  
• PHEHP Student Awards Contest
  
• Patient-Provider Interactions
  This session seeks abstracts that highlight the importance effective communication between health care providers and their patients, including communications that occur outside of the exam room or bedside.  Preference will be given to intervention studies that demonstrate outcomes and state results in the abstract.
• Personal Health Records and their Impact on Health and Wellness (Organized jointly with HIIT)
  Personal health records (PHR) assist individuals in managing  and advocating for their health care by collecting, tracking and sharing information about their current and past health.  This session seeks abstracts addressing current PHR trends and processing.
• Physical activity: Behavior change programs
  This session seeks abstracts of successful individually-adapted health behavior change programs that teach behavioral skills to help participants incorporate physical activity into their daily routines. Of interest are programs tailored to each individual’s specific interests, preferences, and readiness for change and those that teach behavioral skills such as: goal-setting and self-monitoring of progress toward those goals; building social support for new behaviors; behavioral reinforcement through self-reward and positive self-talk; structured problem solving to maintain the behavior change; and, prevention of relapse into sedentary behavior
• Prevention Research Centers
  This session is limited to projects from the national Prevention Research Centers.  Submitters: Please note PRC affiliation in the "Comments" section during the submission process.
• Rare Diseases: A Silent Epidemic and Public Health Crisis
  In the aggregate, rare  diseases are not rare. According to the 2010 IOM report on rare diseases, approximately 7000 rare diseases affect millions of people and are responsible for  untold losses in physical health, behavioral health, and socioeconomic conditions.  This session seeks abstracts related to rare diseases including strategies for addressing the disparities,  challenges faced in health education and promotion, etc.
• Session Proposals
  If you would to propose an intact session, consisting of 4  - 5 abstracts organized around a specific topic, submit each of the abstracts here, and follow the instruction below.
• Sexual Risk Reduction
  Interventions that promote behaviors that prevent or reduce the risk of pregnancy, HIV, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are being sought for this session. Priority in paneling will be given to abstracts that discuss outcomes/results.
• Snack Food and Beverage Industry and Global Noncommunicable Chronic Disease
  This session will focus on the contributions of the products, operations and policies of the snack food and beverage industry to world-wide trends in the increase of noncommunicable diseases, obesity and other risk factors. We invite abstract submissions about such topics as evaluations of policies and laws such as nutritional menu labeling, taxes on sugary sweetened beverages, and restrictions on advertising, promotional items and characters aimed at children; analyzes of the influence of industry grants and partnerships with public health and community organizations;  effects of trade policies on global industrial crop production of snack food and beverage ingredients, and advertising, warning labels, and the distribution and sale of snack foods, beverages and “fast food” restaurants globally;  sale and serving of sugary sweetened beverages and high fat high caloric foods in schools and distribution in government food and nutrition supplement programs.
• Social marketing and health communication campaigns (organized by HCWG)
  Seeking abstracts that focus on evaluation or implementation of social marketing and health communication campaigns that promote healthy behavior.
• Substane Abuse
  This session is seeking abstracts related to substance abuse, it's diagnosis and treatment, and the role of health education and promotion in its prevention.
• The History of Dietary Guidance in the U.S. - How Recommendations Have Changed, Why They Have Changed, and How the Public Perceives and Interprets Them (Organized Jointly with Food & Nutrition)
  This session will explore the history of federal dietary guidelines and recommendations in the United States. Speakers will summarize key changes in dietary guidelines and nutrition education and communications tools used over the past several decades, discuss reasons why guidelines have changed, discuss evaluation findings on the effectiveness of the guidelines, and explore qualitatively how the public receives and interprets these guidelines. 
• Theoretical frameworks for health promotion through the life course
  Theories and conceptual frameworks are encouraged in the research and development of health promotion and health education initiatives. Further discussion is needed to better understand the application of these theories and framework to health conditions that affects  individuals through their lifespan. This session seeks analysis and applications of theories and frameworks used to assess and explain multiple and complex issues that have an impact on individuals’ health through their life course.
• Worksite Wellness and Health Promotion
  Worksite policies and programs may help employees reduce health risks and improve their quality of life. This session seeks abstracts for effective employee-health interventions, be they delivered at the worksite (e.g., signs to encourage stair use, health education classes), at other locations (e.g., gym membership discounts, weight management counseling), or through the employee health benefits plan (e.g., flu shots, cancer screenings)
• Other: Disease or Health Condition Specific
  Have a  disease/condition-specific abstract that is not addressed by any of the session topics on this list?  Then submit it here.
• Other: Health communication topics (organized by HCWG)
  Have a  health communication abstract that is not addressed by any of the session topics on this list?  Then submit it here.

PHEHP Individual Abstract Submission Procedures

Abstracts submitted for consideration should reflect new information or viewpoints not previously published or presented. Abstracts are limited to 250 words and should not contain charts, figures, etc. Abstracts should adequately describe the content and focus of the proposed presentation and follow the general outline of background, methods, results, and conclusions.

In addition to your abstract, you will be asked to provide the following information as part of the online submission process:

• Learning Objectives: At least two measurable learning objectives are needed as a standing APHA requirement and consideration for MCHES and CHES contact hours (see below). The learning objectives are not included in the word count.
• Relevant Keywords: Keywords assist program planners in developing cohesive sessions and in assigning your abstract for blind peer-review. Please select only the keywords that best reflect the primary focus of your abstract submission. If the keyword options in the drop-down menu do not adequately reflect your content, please list your keywords in “Comments to Organizers.”
• Preferred Presentation Format: You may select oral, poster, or either. Please note other preferences in the “Comments to Organizers.” Program planners will try to honor, but cannot guarantee, preference requests.
• Qualifications Statement: Include a brief (1 – 3 sentences) statement regarding why you are qualified to present on the content of your abstract. Statements should be tailored to the content, rather than generic statements related to education, training, or employment. An example is found in the “Continuing Education Credit” section below.
• Conflict of Interest Disclosure: APHA requires presenters to disclose “any relevant personal financial relationship with a commercial entity that benefits the individual and may ultimately bias the presentation of that content.” The policy may be viewed at http://apha.confex.com/apha/disclosurepolicy.pdf
• All abstracts are reviewed using a blind peer-review process. Incomplete abstracts, or those failing to meet guidelines established by APHA, will not be reviewed. View additional information regarding abstract submission guidelines at http://apha.confex.com/apha/138am/intro.html NOTE: Submission of an abstract implies a commitment to make the presentation at the annual meeting. Presenters of accepted abstracts must be, or become, members of APHA and must be registered by the August 11 early-bird deadline.

PHEHP Session Submission Procedures

A session consists of either four 20-minute presentations or five 15-minute presentations addressing a common theme. Session submissions require:

• Individual Abstract Submissions: There is a session slot dedicate to abstracts submitted as part of a session proposal. Each of the four to five presenters must submit her or his abstract individually into this session, following all of the instructions for “Abstract Submissions” provided above.  Additionally, each author must put the proposed session title in the “Comments to Organizers.”
• Overall Session Proposal: The session organizer should email the following information to marilyn.gardner@wku.edu (please include “session proposal” in the subject line):

1. Session organizer’s name and contact information
2. Session title
3. Session overview: 3 – 4 sentences describing the scope of the session
4. Session learning objectives: 2 – 3 measureable learning objectives that reflect the scope of the session
5. APHA-assigned abstract numbers for each of the five individual abstract submissions,
6. Expanded description: No more than one page describing the session in greater detail.

Session proposal reviews will occur after individual abstracts are reviewed. Please note that to provide as comprehensive of a program as possible, PHEHP does NOT generally accept full sessions related to a single project. Sessions with broad appeal or those submitted in collaboration with other sections, SPIGs, caucuses or forums are encouraged (please note collaborations in expanded description). IMPORTANT NOTE: Submission of a session implies a commitment on the part of ALL presenters to make their presentations at the annual meeting. All presenters of accepted sessions must be, or become, members of APHA and must be registered by the August early-bird deadline.

Measureable Learning Objectives

Learning objectives must clearly identify the intended outcomes participants will be able to demonstrate as a result of attending/participating in your presentation. Verbs that cannot be clearly demonstrated (understand, learn, etc.) do not meet this criterion. Per APHA, your learning objectives MUST include one of the following demonstrable verbs: explain, demonstrate, analyze, formulate, discuss, compare, differentiate, describe, name, assess, evaluate, identify, design, define or list. Each learning objective should be listed separately and numbered sequentially. Compound learning objectives (those containing more than one verb) are not permitted. For more information, please see: http://apha.confex.com/apha/learningobjectives.htm

Continuing Education Credit

APHA values the ability to provide continuing education credit to physicians, nurses and health educators at its annual meeting. Please complete all required information when submitting an abstract so members can claim credit for attending your session. These credits are necessary for members to keep their licenses and credentials. As such, all continuing education learning content must be of sound science or professional practice and serve to maintain, develop or increase the knowledge, skills and professional competence of the health professional. Learning content should be evidence-based if available.

For a session to be eligible for Continuing Education Credit, each presenter in that session must provide:

• An abstract free of trade and/or commercial product names
• At least two measurable and non-compound learning objectives
• A signed Conflict of Interest form with a relevant, non-generic qualification statement Example of Acceptable Qualification Statement: I am qualified to present because I oversee programs such as disease prevention, environmental and consumer safety and substance abuse prevention and treatment programs. I also served as an associate professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Clinical infectious Disease. Contact Annette Ferebee at annette.ferebee@apha.org if you have any questions regarding continuing education credit. Please contact program planners for more information.