We have a significant presence in the following areas.

Physical Activity
Physical activity interventions and services are generally conducted within the broader context of chronic disease prevention and health promotion. This reflects the College’s commitment to working with community partners in a comprehensive fashion and avoiding, whenever possible, interventions that take only a piecemeal or individualistic approach to health at the community level. All three of our major health disparity initiatives, the SWCCHP, the Center for Health Equality and the Rural Health Office are involved in partnerships with communities to increase physical activity.

Nutrition
The College’s nutrition programs also are frequently embedded in comprehensive service programs aimed at chronic disease prevention. Most of them are companions to our physical activity programs. In addition, nutrition is included in several of the College’s tobacco programs. The College also provides food frequency analyses to several large interventions, such as the REACH 2010 project in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which is analyzing school lunches and snacks at several intervention schools as part of a comprehensive diabetes intervention.

Tobacco
Arizona has one of the nation’s leading, award-winning tobacco prevention and control programs. It has contributed several of the “best practices” recognized and disseminated by the CDC. The University of Arizona, and now the UA Zuckerman College of Public Health specifically, has been a major contractor with the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) for developing, implementing and evaluating major components of the statewide program. A faculty member drafted Arizona's strategic plan for Tobacco Education and Prevention (AzTEPP). The College’s staff designed and managed the state’s Arizona Smoker’s Helpline, which provides real-time cessation counseling as well as referral and educational services on a statewide toll-free number. The College also conducts community surveys and evaluates several of the AzTEPP programs.

Environmental Health
Because of Arizona’s involvement in mining and agriculture and because of the manufacturing activity on both sides of our border with Mexico, service in environmental health is highly valued. The College’s environmental health programs focus on pesticide exposure in children and adults, arsenic exposure in both Arizona and Sonora, respiratory health in and near mining communities, including Native American communities, total human exposure in the border region compared to the rest of the state and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in analyzing cancer risks.

Access to Care
From the inception of Arizona’s managed care version of Medicaid in the early 1980s to July 2001, eligibility for this program was restricted to those Arizonans whose family income was less than 33.3% of the Federal Poverty Level. Thus, Arizona had an enormous “notch group” of those too “well off” to qualify for the program but without any other form of health insurance. In addition to the economic barriers, there were and still are cultural, legal and geographic barriers to access. Several of the College’s largest service programs address access issues.

The Community Access Program of Arizona (CAPAZ) is a multi-year intervention that aims to create and sustain a medical safety net for the uninsured and underinsured population of southern Yuma County, a major Hispanic border region. Border Vision Fronteriza utilizes promotoras de salud to enroll children in KidsCare, the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program. The principal investigators of both programs are faculty. In addition, faculty members provide technical assistance in the development, implementation and evaluation of programs working to increase access to health care.

Maternal/Infant Care
The first community health worker (CHW) or promotor de salud program in Arizona was a prenatal outreach and education intervention that helped spark the regional and then national renaissance of CHW programs in the ‘80s and ‘90s - a renaissance of which the University of Arizona and the UA Zuckerman College of Public Health are recognized leaders. The Border Vision Fronteriza Project is a major initiative along the entire U.S.-Mexico border to increase outreach, access to health services and health insurance for underserved children and their families. In Arizona specifically, the Nuestros Niños program has dramatically increased the immunization rate in the border community of San Luis, Arizona.

Other programs have targeted mother-to-child HIV transmission, provided technical assistance to the Intertribal Council of Arizona for development of a national WIC study on prevention of childhood obesity, and updated the maternal and child health needs assessment for the state’s MCH block grant.

Other Service Programs
There are many other service programs and activities in addition to those focusing on Arizona Healthy People 2010 goals. They include several binational collaborative projects in women’s health; evaluations of service projects for other agencies and institutions; several cancer interventions and evaluations; the Community Health Worker Evaluation Tool Kit, which has sold over 500 copies worldwide; osteoporosis interventions in four of our most populous counties; and community coalition building in Tucson and elsewhere.