Here we highlight some of our current activities and projects.

Financing for Children with Special Health Care Needs (Shenkman, Principal Investigator)

Our work on financing for CSHCN supports the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to meets its Children with Special Health Care Needs (CSHCN) National Agenda performance outcome that “all families of CSHCN will have adequate private and/or public insurance to pay for the services they need.” Visit our web site for information generated from the project (www.cshcnfinance.ichp.ufl.edu). In addition, the site has linkages to various sites of relevance to this project. These sites include the institutions and organizations participating as partners in the work as well as sites with general information about financing and reimbursement strategies in health care.

TeleHealth Connections for Children and Youth (Youngblade, Principal Investigator)

The purpose of this Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) funded project is to link two cornerstones of Florida’s health-care system – Florida’s Title V program (Children’s Medical Services; CMS) and local community health centers (CHC) – to achieve three goals. (1) To conduct outreach to screen and identify uninsured CSHCN and provide assistance in obtaining primary care at the CHC, insurance coverage, referral to Title V services, and other needed services; (2) To provide education, training, and support to CSHCN and their families, primary care physicians and nurses at the CHC, family health partners, care coordinators at the CHC, nurse coordinators at Title V, and lay health outreach workers about the importance of the medical home; (3) To use telemedicine to reduce access barriers related to Title V eligibility, specialty care, and care coordination. Partners for this project include the Florida Department of Health, Children’s Medical Services; the Florida Institute for Family Involvement (FIFI); the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation; and four community health centers.

An Adaptation of Project Northland for Urban Youth: A Randomized Controlled Trial (Komro, Principal Investigator)

The goal of this research project is to adapt, enhance, implement, and evaluate Project Northland in racially diverse and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods of Chicago. Project Northland is a multi-component intervention to prevent the early onset of alcohol use and includes three years of behavioral curricula, family interventions, youth-planned community service projects, and community organizing. The evaluation design is a randomized controlled trial including 60 Chicago public schools and surrounding neighborhoods that were randomized to intervention or “delayed program” control condition. The study involves a cohort of young people in these 60 schools beginning when they were in sixth grade and following them through eighth grade. The cohort participates in yearly surveys to measure their alcohol use and related risk and protective factors. Additional evaluation strategies include a parent survey, neighborhood leader survey, alcohol purchase attempts, and an assessment of outdoor alcohol advertising. The main study hypothesis is that students in the intervention group, at the end of eighth grade, will have a lower rate of onset of alcohol use compared to students in the control group. This study is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and is the largest prevention study that they have ever funded ($11.5 million from 2001-2006).

Alcohol Policy for Prevention (Wagenaar, Principal Investigator)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has funded an $15 million-million program called Reducing Underage Drinking Through Coalitions, an eight year effort with project sites in 10 states, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. The American Medical Association serves as the National Evaluation Center for this effort. The program was designed to reduce underage drinking using strategies that include youth leadership development, coalition enhancement, alcohol policy development, and public awareness campaigns.

A research project on the Effects of Statutory Changes in DUI Penalties is assessing the effects of changes in legal penalties for driving after drinking between 1976 and 2002 on alcohol-related car crash rates in all 50 U.S. states. The study is using a multiple time-series quasi-experimental design of hundreds of state policy changes, with states serving as “experimental” or “comparison” jurisdictions in any given time period based on law changes passed or constancy of statutory penalties. Results will be of direct interest to health professionals and policy makers, as they work to reduce the death and injury caused by alcohol-impaired drivers.