Oral

In terms of incidence, prevalence, severity and mortality, disparities persist for individuals with chronic health conditions including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and asthma. Low-income and racial-ethnic minority individuals, especially if uninsured, are adversely affected. This session will present some promising strategies to reduce these critical health disparities. We will begin with a discussion of a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and YMCA-USA to enhance public health impact through the development and implementation of community-based strategies. A statewide strategy in Missouri will be described, focusing on increasing physical activity as a way to prevent obesity and its associated health conditions including type 2 diabetes will be described. This will include a discussion of preliminary program evaluation results. The next presentation will focus on strategies in the state of Washington to increase physical activity through the development of community infrastructure that promotes walking, bicycling, and more accessible recreation facilities. We will next describe some of the difficulties in diabetes self-management in a public health population, and public policies to address these problems. Finally, a tool to assess cancer quality cancer screening and follow-up will be described.

Session Objectives: At the end of this session, participants will be better able to: • Describe specific community-based health promotion programs that have been implemented to build community capacity and reduce the burden of chronic diseases (i.e., obesity, heart disease, and diabetes) • Identify techniques to evaluate a multi-site multi-program initiative encouraging healthy and active living • Describe how qualitative research methods can be used for policy evaluation across social and organizational networks • Understand the barriers to self-care among public health clinic diabetic patients • Identify a quality-improvement assessment tool, under development, to facilitate improvement in cancer screening and follow-up in community health centers

CE Credits: CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing