External Resources Directory

This Rural Active Living Assessment (RALA) Tools has been designed to help you collect data on physical environment features and amenities, town characteristics, community programs, and policies that could potentially influence levels of physical activity among residents in your community. This tool will allow you to assess the “friendliness” of your community for walking, biking, and playing (especially among youth). It provides a structure for looking at the town as a whole, how it is laid out, where people live, work and go to school, and how they are likely to get from one place to another. It also includes a detailed tool to look at specific “segments” of your community and assess key characteristics of those segments. Finally, it also provides a structure for assessing the programs and policies that might help to overcome an “unfriendly” environment, or that might actually make that environment less activity friendly.

webinars, talking points, and fact sheet explain the importance of reducing sodium for health, and provide businesses and public health professionals with the facts about consumer preferences, financial costs, and feasibility. Each resource provides real-world examples from businesses that have successfully reduced sodium in the foods they offer.

Health Education & Behavior, August 2015. Objective. Evaluate the second flight of the U.S. Tips From Former Smokers (Tips) campaign. Method. Data were analyzed from an online consumer panel of U.S. adult smokers before (n = 1,404) and after (n = 1,401) the 2013 Tips campaign launch. Generalized estimating equation models assessed whether the Tips advertisement recall was associated with knowledge about smoking-related risks in the Tips advertisements, awareness and use of a toll-free quitline and cessation websites, and quit attempts. Results. Seventy-one percent of participants at Wave 2 reported that they recalled seeing at least one Tips advertisement. Smokers who recalled seeing a Tips advertisement were more likely to (a) show increases over baseline in knowledge of health risks such as amputation 65% versus 34%, p < .001; blindness 27% versus 12%, p < .001; and (b) to be aware of a quitline (41% vs. 30%, p < .001) and cessation website (28% vs. 20%, p < .001). Recall of Tips advertisements was also associated with greater likelihood of reporting having visited cessation websites (odds ratio [OR] = 1.62, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.27-2.06), having called a quitline (OR = 2.28, 95% CI = 1.61-3.24), and having made a quit attempt (OR = 1.18, 95% CI = 1.00-1.39), although these results were only statistically significant in the unadjusted models. Conclusions. The 2013 Tips campaign was successful in increasing knowledge of health risks and awareness of tobacco cessation resources.

This toolkit was developed for a broad continuum of public health care organizations and treatment facilities, particularly those organizations serving persons with mental illnesses and addictions. The materials are intended for administrators, direct providers, and support staff of organizations considering or implementing tobacco-free policies.

ChangeLab Solutions developed the easy-to-use Tobacco Retailer Licensing Playbook to outline the ten strategies necessary for developing, implementing, and enforcing a comprehensive TRL policy. It provides all the steps and considerations involved in building support for TRL, and includes examples and key resources to help communities create a strong local policy that improves public health.