What is your New Year’s Resolution? One of the most popular resolutions is engaging in more physical activity. Moving matters for your health in many ways, so it’s no wonder that increasing physical activity makes it to the top of the goal list for many people every year. However, being more physically active is easier said than done. Let’s explore some of the health benefits of physical activity and go over some ways to keep you motivated throughout the year.
Physical Activity Benefits Against Cancer
There is a slew of reasons that exercise is good for ... well, everything. Countless studies have shown that getting your recommended weekly exercise can greatly reduce your risk for at least eight types of cancer, including bladder, breast, colon, ...
We know little about which transportation investments or initiatives are reducing transportation challenges and meeting people’s transportation needs. For example, are Complete Streets policies meeting the needs of community members? As Smart Growth America releases its best practices to evaluate the success of Complete Streets efforts, we at Salud America! want to draw attention to how transportation needs and barriers have been conceptualized. Across the fields of urban planning, public health, and health care are claims about how transportation impacts health and quality of life. However, regarding these impacts, transportation is often conceptualized only in terms of physical activity, pollution, safety, and/or access to medical care. Although transportation is often ...
Where you live can have a big impact on your health. Non-medical factors like where we are born, live, work, and age — known as the non-medical drives of health (NMDoH) — can influence health for better or worse. However, the U.S. has struggled to identify and help people with NMDoH issues. That's where NMDoH screening comes in. NMDoH screening is a questionnaire given to patients in a healthcare setting to help providers identify non-medical challenges to health. These include issues like financial hardship, transportation, housing, food, employment, and safety. Patients can then be referred to helpful community resources. Here are seven reasons to implement NMDoH screening in your healthcare system, hospital, or clinic.
1. NMDoH Screening Helps Patients Speak ...
In December 2023, the National Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released the sixth edition of the Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria (MMUCC). The MMUCC is a voluntary guideline of standardized data for state and local agencies to collect on motor vehicle crashes. This can help compare crash trends across and between states and guide the design and assessment safety countermeasures and their effectiveness. Earlier in 2023, NHTSA had sought public comment on their revisions to the fifth edition of the MMUCC. Roughly 500 comments were submitted, most by Salud America! members. Unfortunately, it is unclear how NHTSA considered the solicited comments. Because the MMUCC is a voluntary guideline rather than a rule, NHTSA is not required to publish a summary of comments ...
Some big changes in 2022 and 2023 have set up the healthcare sector to advance screening for non-medical drivers of health (NMDoH) in 2024 and beyond. This is great news as we work to address NMDoH, improve health outcomes, and reduce health issues. But one key NMDoH-related need – transportation – isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Transportation is a foundational NMDoH-related need and often co-occurs with other needs and/or acts as a challenge to resolving other needs. Yet transportation is often poorly conceptualized, thus is poorly operationalized in NMDoH-related need screening tools and related justifications. In this post, we review the following big changes as they relate to transportation as non-medical drivers of health: Big Change 1: In 2022, ...
In December 2023, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released the final rule adopting the nearly 1,200-page 11th Edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD). The MUTCD is the national standard for all road marking, highway signs, and traffic signals. Three years prior, the FHWA requested public comments on the proposed changes to the then-700-page MUTCD, which hadn’t been updated since 2009. More than 25,000 people submitted public comments. That included nearly 450 of the model comments developed by our team at Salud America! at UT Health San Antonio. Let’s explore how the FHWA hit the mark for improvement (or missed an opportunity) for five key areas of concern in our model comments and those of other transportation ...
At her annual wellness visit, Dr. Stormee Williams filled out a digital questionnaire that asked about her need for help with housing, transportation, food access, and other non-medical needs. Williams was taking an “Non-Medical Drivers of Health (NMDoH) Screener.” An NMDoH screener is a questionnaire to help healthcare workers identify a patient’s issues with the non-medical drivers of health. These are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of systems that shape life. If a screener finds a patient in need, healthcare workers can then connect the patient to community support and resources. Helping patients address these non-medical needs can help them achieve better health. Williams, fortunately, didn’t have non-medical ...
One of the biggest contributors to climate change are gasoline-powered vehicles, which emit greenhouse gases that warm Earth’s atmosphere. In a positive step, our nation is shifting toward climate-friendly electric vehicles (EVs), which emit less greenhouse gasses than gasoline-powered cars, even when accounting for manufacturing and the electricity used for charging. But a new survey by Axios reveals differences in EV accessibility, especially in the Latino population. How might these differences impact Latino health and our nation’s fight against climate change?
How Do Latinos Feel About EVs?
According to the Axios survey, most Latinos (60%) say it’s important to shift to EVs to minimize climate change damage, but they expressed more interest in buying gas-powered ...
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing to consider pedestrians in their vehicle safety rating system. That is good news for a system that has ignored the safety of people outside the vehicle wherein "pedestrian fatalities have skyrocketed 77% since 2010, compared to 25% for all other traffic-related deaths," according to preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). But the news isn’t all good. NHTSA’s proposed changes to the vehicle safety rating system – the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) – are insufficient. The changes do not differentiate between pedestrian injury risk and fatality risk, and they fail to fully inform consumers about the true risk to pedestrians from vehicles, lessening the potential ...
