Ninth Annual Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Conference / December 10-12, 2003
ROSE CONNOR: Good morning and welcome to Arizona. I was thinking on my way in this morning how fortunate you are to be at this conference rather than some of the employees that we sent to Boston yesterday, so.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hey, some of us our from Boston.
ROSE CONNOR: Oh, welcome to Arizona. The way that we can tell who’s from Boston and from the east coast and the north, when you finish your conference and you’re out by the pool, we’ll be the ones with the jackets on, you’ll be the ones with the shorts, so. We’re really very thrilled to have you here and I think this is one of the nicest conference centers in the valley, so you’ll be treated very nicely, and enjoy the opportunity here at the resort and also in Arizona. I want to welcome from the Arizona Department of Health Services. Dr. *Kathy *Eden is our Director, and we are so excited to have you here with us. We understand the importance of the Maternal Child Health Epidemiology component of our public health services, and I always like to really identify that you are the people that really separate us from a lot of the other disciplines. Your strength and knowledge and your continued striving for excellence in gathering the data that helps us to make the important decisions that we need to in Public Health really is the key to our success, and so I applaud all of you for having the opportunity to be here.
I’m sure you’re all from states that have a few budget crises. We have our own in Arizona, and so we are particularly thrilled to have you here with us. We’ve spent the last two years really building our epidemiology component, primarily in our Maternal and Child Health Division. We’ve always had a very strong epidemiology service in our Infectious Disease Division, but really needed to spend some time in developing and strengthening our epi side in Maternal and Child Health. And I’d like to take the opportunity right now to ask the Arizona Department of Health Services epidemiologists and also the county epidemiologists if they could stand so you can see who they are and if you have some time during the breaks or at lunch to just kind of check out with them some of the things that we’ve done and how we’ve built the strength in that division. So could you all stand? I know we have Raul Munoz who’s our Deputy Director for Prevention Services, who really has taken the lead in developing this service. We have Dr. (inaudible) Applegate and I see we have Dr. Tim Fled, who are two of our medical directors who have really helped us to grow, and the years of experience that they have and the ability to help us learn as really been a great asset to the department and to the state. So thank you for being here with us so we could have all of these folks learn from you because if we were out of state, you’d see a lot less of us.
Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology is crucial for guiding interventions and setting priorities for public health. As funding becomes more difficult to obtain, the ability to collect and interpret data in needs assessments, implementation and evaluation of programs is needed more than ever. The data that’s collected by epidemiologists is turned into information. That information can be turned into policies and programs, and it provides us the information that allows us to gauge how and what we are doing in promoting Maternal and Child Health and information used to refine our efforts based on the data. The partnerships between public health professionals and the MCH epidemiologists are essential. As you all know, programs cannot function in isolation. All the latest research shows the importance of a holistic approach to the interventions. We have discovered the importance of determining resiliency factors as well as risk factors in creating programs and interventions. We have learned that we must develop an understanding of how multiple risk and resiliency factors influence each other. The epidemiologists in Maternal and Child Health play an important role in providing the facts that help to develop and evaluate the programs. I’ve got to be here a few minutes early and had a change to review some of your poster sessions, and again, I just want to reiterate: I think these are the smartest people that we have in public health collectively in your group today. So I hope you take the time to enjoy our wonderful winter. This is about as wintry as we get, so. We appreciate your being here with us, and hope that you have a wonderful conference. Thank you.