External Resources Directory

a tool and guidance that may be used to help prioritize improvements to pedestrian and bicycle facilities, either separately or together as part of a “complete streets” evaluation approach.

Health Education Behavior, April 2015. Abstract Designing culturally sensitive personalized interventions is essential to sustain patients’ involvement in their treatment and encourage patients to take an active role in their own health and health care. We consider patient activation and empowerment as a cyclical process defined through patient accumulation of knowledge, confidence, and self-determination for their own health and health care. We propose a patient-centered, multilevel activation and empowerment framework (individual-, health care professional-, community-, and health care delivery system-level) to inform the development of culturally informed personalized patient activation and empowerment (P-PAE) interventions to improve population health and reduce racial and ethnic disparities. We discuss relevant Affordable Care Act payment and delivery policy reforms and how they affect patient activation and empowerment. Such policies include Accountable Care Organizations and value-based purchasing, patient-centered medical homes, and the community health benefit. Challenges and possible solutions to implementing the P-PAE are discussed. Comprehensive and longitudinal data sets with consistent P-PAE measures are needed to conduct comparative effectiveness analyses to evaluate the optimal P-PAE model. We believe the P-PAE model is timely and sustainable and will be critical to engaging patients in their treatment, developing patients’ abilities to manage their health, helping patients express concerns and preferences regarding treatment, empowering patients to ask questions about treatment options, and building up strategic patient–provider partnerships through shared decision making.

In April 2017, the Status Report for Step It Up! The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Walking and Walkable Communities was released. The Call to Action provided a clear road map for partners across all sectors to improve walking and walkability for all Americans. The Status Report summarizes the state of walking and walkability when the Call to Action was released, as well as selected activities done since the release to sustain the messages and promote the goals established by the Surgeon General. The objective of this presentation is to summarize the key findings from the Status Report, including success stories from partners in the field who are taking action to promote the goals of the Call to Action.

Ohio has made progress in supporting active transportation through cross-sector collaboration since their attendance at the Step it Up! Action Institute on Walking and Walkability. The state is focused on strategies that revolve around education, infrastructure, planning, and data collection to elevate active transportation. Since the event, the Ohio Department of Health has sponsored five regional Complete Streets training, the Ohio Department of Transportation offered new funding for local active transportation projects, and together, they are working on replicating the Action Institute for local communities to attend in June 2017. The Action Institute will revolve around “Experiential Education,” best practice infrastructure, Complete Streets policies, and new statewide bike/ped data collection and coordination efforts. In May, Ohio will be launching a statewide campaign called Your Move to encourage people to walk, bike, and take the bus.

Presentation Speakers: Gayathri Kumar, MD, Medical Officer, Physical Activity and Health Branch, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention // Caitlin Harley, BS, Healthy Places Coordinator, Creating Healthy Communities Program, Ohio Department of Health.

Gayathri Suresh Kumar, MD, is a Medical Officer in the Physical Activity Branch, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (DNPAO) within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). After joining the group over a year ago around the time of the release of the Step it Up! The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Walking and Walkable Communities, she helped lead the development of the first status report for the Call to Action. Prior to working within the Physical Activity Branch, she also served as a CDC field assignee to the Georgia Department of Public Health to assist with the implementation of the 1305 cooperative agreement (State Public Health Actions to Prevent and Control Diabetes, Heart Disease, Obesity and Associated Risk Factors and Promote School Health) and as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer within the Obesity Prevention and Control Branch within DNPAO. She received her MD from Indiana University School of Medicine and completed her training in Internal Medicine at Emory University Department of Internal Medicine.

Caitlin Harley is the Healthy Places Coordinator for the Creating Healthy Communities program at the Ohio Department of Health. In this role, she focuses on the intersection of health and the built environment, emphasizing the role of physical activity and mobility in chronic disease prevention. Cait also works closely with the Ohio Department of Transportation and leads their Active Transportation Emphasis Area Team as part of their Strategic Highway Safety Plan. Cait is a graduate of Ohio State University with a B.S. in City and Regional Planning and has a passion for how transportation planning can impact the mobility and health of community residents. She practices what she preaches by walking, biking, or taking the bus to work and meetings.

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION – EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities provides smart growth strategies to help communities grow in ways that expand economic opportunity while protecting human health and the environment. EPA’s Smart School Siting Tool was developed to help local government and school agencies work together to make better-informed decisions about school siting or renovation by considering established community goals. The Smart School Siting Tool emphasizes •Choosing school locations that provide safe routes to school, foster active lifestyles, and promote community health;•Coordinating school planning processes with local government land use planning priorities to use taxpayer dollars more efficiently; and•Siting schools close to existing neighborhoods and infrastructure (e.g., water, sewer, sidewalks, walking and bike paths, and public transit) to make efficient use of past infrastructure investments and improve safe and active transportation options. A school that’s safe and easy for students, teachers, parents, and other community members to reach on foot or by bicycle encourages physical activity and reduces air pollution from automobile use. Students who walk or bike to school achieve a portion of their suggested daily physical activity requirements during their commute. Neighborhood schools that have joint use agreements for their gyms and playgrounds can provide more options for children’s physical activity after school hours and on weekends. EPA’s Smart School Siting Tool enables communities to evaluate the environmental and public health risks and benefits of potential locations as part of a holistic school siting process. It also demonstrates how well-located schools can encourage students, families, faculty and staff to engage in active transportation and healthy living. The University of Arizona Nutrition Network (UANN), in partnership with the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS), has implemented the Active School Neighborhood Checklist (ASNC) project over the past two years. The ASNC is a tool for assessing the walkability, bikeability, and safety of school site and was co-created by the ADHS and the Arizona Department of Transporation – Safe Routes to School Program. In Phase I of the project, the UANN assessed 10 Title I elementary schools the Sunnyside Unified School District (SUSD) of Tucson, AZ. In Phase II, in partnership with a local non-profit The Living Streets Alliance, two of the SUSD schools assessed will be chosen to receive walking and biking maps to use with their school community. Schools will be selected by their ASNC score as well as by a myriad of other local factors such as planned infrastructure improvements, strength of parent involvement in the school/school health advisory council, distance from bicycle boulevards, and future Cyclovia route locations, etc.

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION DRAWING THE IMPOSSIBLE MAP ONE APPROACH TO CREATE A SIDEWALK INVENTORY IN UTAH – Working with partners to develop a sidewalk inventory was much more complicated than originally conceived. Rather than flipping a switch, identifying an overall sidewalk network required multiple approaches to collect data into a regional map, as well as building relationships with key people to make the map mean something to all users. Both challenges and approaches to develop this network map will be discussed, as well as where this map leads the Utah Department of Health and its partners in future projects. USING THE GEORGIA TECH SIDEWALK QUALITY AND SAFETY ASSESSMENT SYSTEM TO INVENTORY AND MANAGE COMMUNITY SIDEWALK ASSETS – An accessible pedestrian environment, characterized by well-maintained sidewalks and curb ramps, helps ensure the safety and comfort of pedestrians of all abilities. However, prioritizing annual sidewalk repairs in a constrained budget is especially difficult for communities that have a significant repair backlog. The absence of comprehensive and transparent sidewalk asset management plans also make sidewalk prioritization difficult for local agencies. Over the last several years, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have been developing the Sidewalk Quality and Safety Assessment System (SQSA) that communities can use to inventory, assess, prioritize, and manage sidewalk improvements. Georgia Tech researchers will present on the SQSA and how the tools that comprise this system have helped communities strategically manage and improve their sidewalk assets. The presentation will begin with a brief overview of the requirements in the Americans with Disabilities Act that pertain to sidewalks. Next it will showcase the capabilities of the SQSA tools•Sidewalk Scout A crowdsourcing smartphone app used by agencies and the public to report sidewalk problems. The app allows users to submit a picture and a detailed description of a sidewalk problem and automatically geotags the location of the report.•Sidewalk Sentry A tablet application used to inventory sidewalks and assess sidewalk quality. A smart tablet attached to a basic wheelchair collects and geocodes sidewalk attribute and quality data.•The Sidewalk Quality Index A prioritization and programming tool. An online survey gathers input from the community on their preferences for sidewalk investment, which is utilized as part of a locally-responsive sidewalk rating and ranking system.Finally, the presentation will provide an example of how the SQSA has been successfully utilized for sidewalk asset management and planning in East Point, GA.