It wasn’t too long ago that COVID-19 threw life into chaos.
Businesses shut their doors. Food and supplies ran low. We were separated from our loved ones and trapped indoors. Hospitals dealt with rising demand. Lives were lost.
Years have passed since the pandemic and we’ve tried to distance ourselves from a time when distillers halted production to make hand sanitizer, grocery stores had lanes, and smiles were hidden behind masks.
However, some are still living with a constant reminder of that time.
For those with Long COVID-19, time hasn’t healed the wounds of the past as they still try to recover from the physical, mental, and emotional traumas of the condition.
That’s why Health Confianza — a Bexar County health literacy initiative housed at The University of Texas ...
In recent years, researchers have made a larger effort to tap into previously underrepresented communities, such as communities of color, to create more inclusive research that benefits everyone. But many people still have deep-rooted mistrust of research. And not all researchers who work with these communities end up bringing the benefits of their research back to boost the health of those communities. The PATIENTS Program at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy is attempting to rewrite the narrative and give researchers, patients, caregivers, and others the tools to provide a continuous patient-centered approach to research. The PATIENTS Professors Academy is a free, virtual training course centered around improving health equity and the health outcomes ...
U.S. Army soldier Tony Rentas, a native of Puerto Rico who dreamed of serving in the military all his life, had a seizure while on a mission in Kosovo. Tony was diagnosed with a low grade glioma, a rare type of brain tumor. He had no idea what a low grade glioma was. So, he started Googling. He found little that helped him understand this diagnosis and what it meant for him and his familia, and even less was available in Spanish. That is why Tony is sharing his story and participating in the International Low Grade Glioma Registry, which hopes to learn more about the best ways to treat these tumors across different groups of people, including members of the Hispanic/Latino community. “One of the biggest things that I wanted to do is help people as much as I can,” Tony ...
We know little about which transportation investments or initiatives are reducing transportation barriers 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 social determinants of health (SDoH) — can influence health for better or worse. However, the U.S. has struggled to identify and help people with SDoH issues. That's where SDoH screening comes in. SDoH screening is a questionnaire given to patients in a healthcare setting to help providers identify non-medical barriers 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 SDoH screening in your healthcare system, hospital, or clinic.
1. SDoH Screening Helps Patients Speak Up
SDoH ...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently unanimously upheld the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s mandate for graphic health warning labels on cigarette packs and advertising. The graphic health warning labels show written statements with photo-realistic color images depicting some serious health risks of cigarette smoking. Risks include impact to fetal growth, cardiac disease, diabetes, and more. In recent years, Salud America! members sent emails to FDA in favor of the labels. Now, the appeals court upheld the FDA requirement for the labels and rejected “arguments from R.J. Reynolds that the labels violate the First Amendment or take up too much space on packages,” according to the Public Health Law Center (PHLC). “In upholding the graphic ...
Sit down and buckle up because the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program could be pulling into a town near you!
On April 16, 2024, the All of Us Research Program announced its annual nationwide tour focused on engaging historically underrepresented communities in medical research, according to a recent news release.
The national mobile tour, dubbed “the All of Us Journey,” kicked off its route with stops on the East Coast in Ohio before eventually making its way to the New York area in early May.
Other East Coast stops include Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia along with first-time destinations of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
The program plans to visit more than 80 communities, including central regions like Texas, Colorado, and New ...
After careful consideration, the Institute for Integration of Medicine & Science (IIMS) at UT Health San Antonio and UTSA College for Health, Community, and Policy (HCaP) have announced the recipients of new Community Engagement Small Project Grants.
Five grantees were chosen to lead projects covering HIV/AIDS, faith’s impact on criminal rehabilitation, artistic influence on young brain development, and more, according to a recent university news release.
The grants, for one year and up to $5,000, aim to promote, develop, and expand community and scholarly research partnerships that benefit science and clinicians. Each project will meet local needs through community-engaged research or assessment, education, and distributing research results or policy implications.
This ...
The summer of 2023 was one of the hottest seasons on record for some areas across the US, bringing sweltering temperatures that caused heat stroke and heat exhaustion.
Experts see this as a prime example climate change endangering health.
While extreme weather events like heat are nothing new, the frequency of these events is cause for concern, especially when it comes to health and well-being.
To tackle some of these issues, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a new toolkit to help healthcare professionals arm themselves with knowledge about climate change and health.
Communicating on climate change and health toolkit for health professionals discusses the ways to start difficult conversations about climate change with patients, other providers, and officials, and find ...
