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Information & Education Campaign for Health Care Providers

An Effective Practice

This practice has been Archived and is no longer maintained.

Description

In response to low physician compliance with communicable disease reporting guidelines, the Santa Cruz County Health Agency decided to revise the Essential Reporting Guidelines and develop an information campaign to increase communicable disease reporting while simultaneously educating physicians and other healthcare providers on bioterrorism issues. The campaign decided to publish the guide in a binder format so that new pages could be mailed to providers and out-of-date information could be discarded without having to publish a completely new guide. This would also enable them to quickly respond to emerging infectious diseases such as West Nile Virus and SARS.

Goal / Mission

The goal of the project was to publish an up-to-date Essential Reporting Guidelines which would be distributed to approximately 90% of healthcare providers in Santa Cruz county. As mentioned above, they wanted to increase reporting and surveillance activities with the primary physicians and also educate them on bioterrorism agents.

Results / Accomplishments

In the first quarter after the initial distribution of the binder, the health agency experienced a 20% increase in communicable disease reports and had 37 individual requests from providers for the new binder over the next year. They also placed the binder in its entirety on our Public Health web site for easy access and to aid other local jurisdictions in developing similar guides.

About this Promising Practice

Organization(s)
Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency
Primary Contact
Laurie Lang, Senior Health Educator
Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency
Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention Program
1070 Emeline, Bldg. G
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(831) 454-4733
llang@health.co.santa-cruz.ca.us
http://www.santacruzhealth.org/
Topics
Health / Health Care Access & Quality
Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases
Community / Social Environment
Organization(s)
Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency
Source
National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO)
Date of publication
2005
Date of implementation
2003
Location
Santa Cruz County, CA
For more details
Additional Audience
Healthcare Providers