Children, Adolescents, & Teens

• A new Georgia law ensures students with asthma have access to life-saving inhalers at school and provides immunity for trained staff to administer an inhaler to a student believed to be experiencing respiratory distress, regardless of whether the student has a prescription.
• Colorado’s Building Bridges for Asthma Care, an inner-city program, helped reduce asthmatic student absenteeism by up to 20%, according to a new study.

• Three years after Connecticut began requiring flu vaccination for children in licensed child care, flu-related hospitalizations of preschool-aged children decreased 12%.
• The Public Health Foundation is testing a Public Health Antibiotic Stewardship Driver Diagram in Maine, Connecticut, and Independence, Missouri, to help public and clinical health care work together to reduce antibiotic-resistant infections. California, Georgia, Indiana [PDF 391KB], and Minnesota, among other states, also have antibiotic stewardship resources.

The Bronx Teen Connection program is placing trained health educators in South Bronx high schools to provide information and referrals to teen-friendly reproductive and sexual health services.

• The program is also using an app that helps New York City teens connect to sexual health clinics.

In 2012, as part of the Think Teen pregnancy prevention program, the Mobile County (Alabama) Health Department turned part of a pediatric clinic into a teen-friendly sexual and reproductive health clinic for adolescents only.

• The clinic increased hormonal contraception (pill, patch, ring, injectable) prescriptions to adolescent clients from 3.1% in 2012 to 12.8% in 2013.