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Maggie Davis, ASTHO Director of State Health Policy, outlines ASTHO’s new Public Health Legal Mapping Center tool aimed to highlight policies that may prevent overdose; Liljana Baddour, ASTHO’s Senior Director for Workforce Development, says...
Maggie Davis, ASTHO Director of State Health Policy, outlines ASTHO’s new Public Health Legal Mapping Center tool aimed to highlight policies that may prevent overdose; Liljana Baddour, ASTHO’s Senior Director for Workforce Development, says challenges to expanding public health workforce go beyond recruiting; ASTHO’s new Project ECHO: Overdose Fatality Investigative Techniques aims to improve reporting; and sign up for ASTHO’s Public Health Weekly email newsletter
ASTHO Webpage: Workforce Policy Spotlight: Successfully Raising FTE Caps in Rhode Island
ASTHO Webpage: Creating Effective Virtual Trainings for Medical Examiners and Coroners
ROBERT JOHNSON:
This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Wednesday, August 9, 2023. I'm Robert Johnson. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
MAGGIE DAVIS:
This is a visualization of state laws and proposed legislation around important public health issues.
JOHNSON:
Across jurisdictions, policies to fight the opioid epidemic vary greatly. ASTHO's Maggie Davis says a new tool called the Public Health Legal Mapping Center surveys those approaches and presents them as easy-to-use maps.
DAVIS:
So, this first map focusing on harm reduction laws, looks at laws that are supporting community distribution of naloxone, laws that legalize overdose prevention centers, as well as laws that allow the legalization and distribution of fentanyl test strips.
JOHNSON:
One map reviews the legalization of overdose prevention centers.
DAVIS:
At this point, only one state has legalized overdose prevention centers, that's Rhode Island. Then we have a number of states that have enacted laws to facilitate the community distribution of naloxone.
JOHNSON:
The tool also tracks the designation of test strips as drug paraphernalia.
DAVIS:
So in a number of states, by the kind of existing law that's been on the books for decades, this public health tool is not legal. So, states have been working really rapidly to either legalize fentanyl test strips or kind of create special carve outs to support the use of fentanyl test strips as a harm reduction measure that is an evidence-based strategy to prevent overdose.
JOHNSON:
You can check out the tool by clicking the link in the show notes.
The public health workforce lost more than 30,000 full-time jobs before the pandemic. This is ASTHO's Liljana Baddour.
LILJANA BADDOUR:
And then you fold COVID-19 into the mix and public health agencies had major challenges to provide these essential public health services while responding to COVID. Then with the Great Resignation, that made matters worse the last couple of years with added vacancies.
JOHNSON:
Finding people is one challenge. Another is having permission to hire them.
BADDOUR:
Too often, public health agencies are just- have just too few positions allowed by their state legislatures to be able to hire direct employees or those FTEs, as we call them. And as a result, agencies have no other choice than to rely on a variety of staffing mechanisms to meet these missions.
JOHNSON:
Baddour says agencies are using contractors to fill gaps, even though there are downsides.
BADDOUR:
Number one, it can cost the state more, due to the overhead costs. Number two, it can create pay and benefit inequities between FTEs and contract employees. And last but not least, number three, it can and often does create a variety of complications including unequal requirements, access to systems, data, onboarding, training, and other development opportunities.
JOHNSON:
Rhode Island recently expanded its FTE cap. Learn how the state did it in a new ASTHO blog article now online. The link is in the show notes.
Also today, medical examiners and coroners are under more stress than ever before. A new ASTHO project could help. O'Keyla Cooper has more.
O'KEYLA COOPER:
The COVID-19 pandemic increased overdose deaths by 14% in 2021, straining medical examiners and coroners, potentially leading to errors in death certificates and ICD 10 codes. To address this, ASTHO and CDC collaborated with SMEs to launch Project ECHO, overdose fatality investigative techniques using the ECHO model to improve accuracy in reporting overdose deaths among medical examiners and coroners. Read the full blog article by clicking the link in the show notes.
JOHNSON:
Finally, this morning, you can get more news like this every week when you sign up for ASTHO's Public Health Weekly email newsletter. Join the list using the link in the show notes.
And if you have a minute, please take the time to give us a review. We'd like to know what you think.
That'll do it for today's newscast. We're back tomorrow morning, celebrating the second anniversary of the newscast with more ASTHO news and information. I'm Robert Johnson. You're listening to the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition. Have a great day.
