PH/HA News

Are you looking for a way to stay informed about current issues in public health? Hot Topics in Preparedness is a monthly online forum produced by the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice. Each hour-long session is recorded and archived on the web site. Presentation slides and supplementary materials are also available.

On July 15, Maryanne Blake and Gail Kouame from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region presented “How Wise Are You? The National Library of Medicine’s Preparedness and Response Resources.” Watch this presentation for demonstrations of the Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders (WISER) and MedlinePlus as well as some discussion of how librarians could be involved in emergency response planning.

Other recent Hot Topics include:

• Disasters in Public Health: Learning from Recent History
• A Tale of Two Floods: The Long and Short of it for Public Health Practice
• Environmental Health Assessment for China’s 2008 Summer Olympics

New PHPartners Topic Pages on Nutrition and Workforce Development

The Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce has released two new topic pages on http://PHPartners.org on Nutrition and Workforce Development. PHPartners is a collaboration of U.S. government agencies, public health organizations and health science libraries which provides timely, convenient access to selected resources on the Internet.

The topic page on Nutrition, http://phpartners.org/nutrition.html, includes links to government, professional and research organizations that focus nutrition issues; grants and funding opportunities; legislation and health policy issues related to nutrition; published literature and research reports; and nutrition promotion, education and information resources.

The topic page on Workforce Development, http://phpartners.org/workforcedevelopment.html, provides links on public health workforce development activities and resources including education and training opportunities; legislative action; professional meetings, summits, councils, and conferences; new workers development programs; tools and resources on public health workforce issues; and workforce projects and research reports.

PHPartners.org welcomes suggestions of public health resources to post on the site. Links can be suggested at http://phpartners.org/suggestlink.html.

To keep up-to-date with public health news and new content posted to PHPartners.org, you can subscribe to the PHPartners weekly email announcement list or RSS feeds, linked from the home page of http://PHPartners.org.

Welcome to the PH/HA News blog!

I invite you all to review the blog policies and make comments and suggestions below in the “Leave a Reply” box. These comments will be reviewed and incorporated in the final version. The notes that follow should further articulate the nature of the blog and the type of submissions that will be encouraged. It is our hope that this blog becomes an active forum for those interested in public health librarianship.

Purpose:
The purpose of PH/HA News is to provide information about the activities of the Public Health/Health Administration Section of the Medical Library Association, as well as news of interest to those involved with public health and health administration.

Posting Policies:
Any PH/HA member may request an account from the blog editor, and thereby post to PH/HA News. Information about how to request an account will be available from the sidebar of PH/HA News.

Comments:
Anyone may post a comment on a PH/HA News post. Comments are moderated to avoid spam, not to edit content. If comments become dramatically off-topic, the blog editor will privately inform the commenter of the scope of PH/HA News. If there is no way to contact an anonymous commenter, the off-topic comment will be removed. Inappropriate comments will be removed immediately.

Both blog posts and comments should follow the MLA Task Force on Social Networking Software Guidelines for Bloggers. (copied almost verbatim from MLA EMTS blog guidelines - http://emts.mlanet.org/blog/?page_id=7)

Relationship to PH/HA listserv:
Although only PH/HA members may contribute to the blog, all posts will be visible to the public. The PH/HA listserv should still be used to pose questions to the group and to carry out section business. The blog might be a logical place to post or cross-post summaries of responses posed on the listserv, with identifying information removed.

For the benefit of PH/HA members who do not use RSS feeds, the blog editor will send to the listserv a monthly summary of new posts on PH/HA News.

Relationship to PH/HA del.icio.us account:
When new links are added to the PH/HA del.icio.us account, they will automatically be posted to PH/HA News using the “daily blog posting” feature in del.icio.us/settings.

This blog is currently under development. If you are looking for our quarterly newsletters, you can find them here.