Physical Activity Section Newsletter

Fall 2013

In this issue:

Message from the Chair Join the Physical Activity Section at the APHA Annual Meeting Fitting Physical Activity into the APHA Annual Meeting Join the APHA Physical Activity Section Leadership Team APHA PA Section Member Profile: Matt Chrisman, Texas Tech University Student Corner: Finding a Meaningful Practicum in Physical Activity News from APHA Physical Activity Section Members News from APHA Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Fall Newsletter for our Physical Activity Section. As the weather gets colder in many parts of the country (though not here in sunny Honolulu) and the days get shorter, it can become harder and harder for people to find their 30 minutes a day to be active. However, this is the perfect time for all of us to promote physical activity no matter what sector we work in. With school back in session, it is a great time to start a walking school bus program, apply for Safe Routes to School funds or work on developing an active afterschool program. With the holidays coming up, it is a great time to invigorate worksite wellness programs to prevent the typical weight gain associated with the holiday season. This is also a fantastic time to meet with your elected officials. For many state legislatures, the legislative session takes place in the spring. Meeting with your elected officials in the recess period to educate them on active communities is an excellent strategy. For those of us in academia, our next generation of physical activity professionals has arrived on campus. This is a great time to involve them in all of the exciting things happening in the field. I look forward to seeing many of you in a few short weeks in Boston. Our Physical

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Activity Section business meeting will take place on the Sunday afternoon. It is open to everyone, so please stop by and get involved. I will be the one shivering in the Hawaiian shirt. Aloha, Jay Maddock, PhD, University of Hawaii Join the Physical Activity Section at the APHA Annual Meeting

Are you interested in learning about successful community initiatives to promote physical activity? Want to hear how strategic policies are changing physical activity environments? Are you spending too much time at your computer and not enough time interacting with other researchers and talking about innovations in methods, measures, and interventions? If there was a glimmer of a ‘yes’ in your response, then book your trip to Boston for the APHA Annual Meeting in November. Along with our promotion from a SPIG to a full APHA Section and avid interest among conference attendees at past conferences (PA sessions standing-room only!), we were awarded a substantial increase in the number of sessions devoted to PA for this year’s Annual Meeting. We also had an unprecedented number of abstract submissions this year (108!), and the Program Planning Committee has worked hard to put together a cohesive yet diverse program related to physical activity and public health. As enthusiasm and interest in physical activity grows, we expect a great turnout and lively discussions at all of the podium and poster sessions. We expect a repeat of standing room only for our Podium Sessions (invite your friends and come early to ensure a good seat). The themes for the Podium Sessions include:

• Policy in action: How joint use agreements and local policies support physical activity in the community

• Across the generations: Targeting physical activity through community based interventions

• Innovations in technology to promote physical activity • Schools on the move: What's new in physical activity programs • People, parks, and places: Environmental influences on physical activity • Building community coalitions to improve physical activity • Policies, plans, and evaluations in active transportation

Take advantage of this great opportunity to talk to presenters one-on-one at the Poster Sessions. The titles of the poster sessions are:

• Physical activity in diverse settings • Physical activity in diverse communities and places

We are also excited to host two special Invited Podium Sessions:

• Local solutions to the global problem of physical inactivity including talks from the mayor of Somerville, Joe Curtatone, as well as local experts I-Min Lee and Mark Fenton

• Physical Activity Policy Research Network (PAPRN): Bridging policy and practice

The Annual Meeting is a great opportunity to network and interact with others working in the area of physical activity and public health. Just when you start to get overwhelmed by all the offerings at APHA, our Social Committee has the perfect antidotes with these special events designed with our Section members in mind:

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• Back by popular demand: Monday Nov. 4, Mobile Workshops in the afternoon include

guided tours by WalkBoston and the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy. The PA Section reception will follow off-site.

• Recover from Monday’s fun with the Tuesday morning PA Section coffee hour, (Nov. 5). Don’t drink coffee? Come anyway for the conversation and a chance to win special prizes.

We look forward to seeing you in Boston for what will be another fabulous Annual Meeting!

Fitting Physical Activity into the APHA Annual Meeting

By Amy Eyler, PhD, CHES The Annual Meeting is a great way to increase your public health knowledge, but it often includes long days coupled with additional meetings and dinners, leaving little time for exercise. Prolonged periods of sitting can turn public health into a public health hazard. Here are some tips to stay active during the conference:

• Walk to the conference center instead of using taxi or transport. If too far, get dropped off a few blocks away so you can walk at least part of the way.

• Set your alarm 15 minutes early and get up to do some stretching or in-room calisthenics.

• Pack resistance bands for a quick workout. • Plan a walking meeting instead of a sitting-over-coffee meeting with colleagues. • Wear comfy shoes so you can fit in a brisk walk when you have a break during the day. • Stand up for a quick stretch between speakers during a session, or get up and stand at

the back of the room to listen to the speakers. • Take the stairs when they are an option. • Wear a pedometer to monitor your steps. • Use the hotel gym before or after the day at the conference.

Good luck, stay active and enjoy the APHA Annual Meeting! Amy Eyler is chair-elect of the APHA Physical Activity Section and an assistant professor in the Brown School of Social Work, Masters of Public Health Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Join the APHA Physical Activity Section Leadership Team

Be a national leader in physical activity! Are you interested in getting more involved with our Physical Activity Section? A leadership position is a way to contribute your skills and gain great experience to put on your CV. We have several open committee chair seats that we need great people to fill. This is an exciting way to get involved in APHA and build momentum up for our new Section. All of these seats are appointed, not elected. The open positions are for the following committees:

• Membership Committee • Policy Committee

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• Communication Committee • Program Planning Committee • Awards Committee • Social Planning Committee • We also have two open seats for Section Councilors. If you would like to serve in this

role in addition to being a committee chair, please let me know. If you are a student member and interested in student leadership positions, please contact Richard Christiana at rchristi@uga.edu.

I will do my best to get everyone who is interested into some type of role. If you are interested, please send your name, CV or resume and the position(s) you are interested in by Oct. 1 to aeyler@wustl.edu. Most of these seats are to serve as the chair-elect for these committees. They will start at the end of this year’s Annual Meeting in Boston with the committee chair term starting at the end of the 2014 New Orleans meeting and finishing after the Annual Meeting in 2015. Please let me know if you have questions about any of these positions, and I look forward to you joining our APHA Physical Activity Section team. Sincerely, Amy Eyler, Chair-Elect APHA PA Section Member Profile: Matthew Chrisman, PhD, Texas Tech University

In each newsletter, the PA Section will highlight a member doing interesting things in the field of physical activity and public health. Read on to learn more about Matthew Chrisman, PhD, at Texas Tech University. Where do you work? I currently work as a post-doc research associate in the Department of Nutrition, Hospitality, and Retailing at Texas Tech University. What do you do as a Post-doc Research Associate? I am relatively new here, having just finished my PhD this past May. My role here at Texas Tech is to assist with current research projects and to begin developing my own independent research platform. In this post-doc position, I have shifted gears a little bit from physical activity to include more of a focus on nutrition, and projects that I will be working on here include an examination of food insecurity in low-income minorities, and evaluating nutrition interventions in the rural south. We plan to examine “positive deviance” in individuals living in areas where food insecurity is high, in order to determine what practices and strategies are useful for avoiding a lack of food security in those areas. I will also assist with physical activity assessments in research projects, including a study of the health behaviors of military families based in Texas, and I am very excited to apply my physical activity knowledge in real-world settings. I am also working to publish my dissertation research, which focused on the influence of the perceived social, physical and policy environments on physical activity in rural adults in the Midwest. In addition, I was interested in examining correlates of physical activity specific to

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the domain in which the activity occurs (leisure time, occupational activity, etc.). One of my dissertation projects was selected by Delta Omega, the honor society for public health, to be presented at the upcoming APHA Annual Meeting in Boston. That project was a survey of how the rural environment influences domain-specific physical activity. Some of the important findings include the importance of observational learning (or seeing others being active) and awareness of existing physical activity resources, gravel roads as a barrier to cycling, and the desire to see community buildings be open to the public for use in being active. The data can be used in helping plan physical activity interventions for rural adults. I have a strong desire to teach, and will be working on developing a course that will focus on health education and how the environment influences diet and physical activity. It is very exciting to see how urban design has changed to include more emphasis on green spaces, and how projects like Blue Zone communities are creating more opportunities for people to be active throughout America. I hope to be able to contribute more to this field as we move toward reaching Healthy People 2020 goals. Were you always interested in physical activity growing up and throughout your education? The answer is a resounding YES! This interest originally came from a childhood and adolescence of playing sports. During my undergrad years, my father passed away from heart disease, and the trauma of dealing with that motivated me to learn how to prevent that from happening to others. I originally wanted to become a personal trainer and help people on an individual level, but after attending a presentation from Dr. Ross Brownson (of Washington University in St. Louis) on the importance of public health, I knew my real passion would be working to influence the health of everyone. I channeled this passion into pursuing my PhD in public health. I chose the Department of Community and Behavioral Health in the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health, which was a perfect match for me. I was able to focus my studies on my behavior of interest (physical activity) in a population of interest (rural adults). My personal interests are in health promotion and reducing/preventing chronic diseases through physical activity and diet. I want to understand how to make healthy choices the default choice for behavior, which will likely involve an emphasis on the environment that we live in. The ultimate goal would be to understand how changing our environment will influence our health behaviors in order to contribute toward developing relevant policies that will influence the health of all. What do you like to do in your 'free' time? I am a voracious reader and take full advantage of local libraries to access everything Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle and other nutrition writers publish. I love to cook and enjoy trying new foods. I am also very active, playing soccer and softball. I make it a point to walk to campus for work every day to exhibit a model of healthy behavior. I also follow all of my favorite sports teams, and hope to use my skills as a drummer to play in a band someday. If you ask me, drumming is the most active of all the instruments you can play!

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What are your future plans? In the future, I hope to become a professor and continue researching how the environment influences our behavior. I have spent the majority of my life in the Midwest, and I am enjoying living in a warmer climate and experiencing cultural practices of the South. I look forward to exploring how these may influence my own physical activity, as well as the activity patterns of others. Student Corner

Finding a Meaningful Practicum in Physical Activity By Daria Winnicka, BA Ah, the practicum. Regardless of the specific MPH degree you seek to obtain (mine will be in physical activity and public health), each of us must complete a practicum before graduation. If you are unfamiliar with a practicum, it is essentially an internship. Most require graduate students to complete a minimum of 250 contact hours (six credit hours) within the experience. Once the hours are complete, you hand in a practicum notebook, host a 30-45 minute presentation on the experience with your mentor, preceptor and guests, and then it becomes a pass/fail on your transcript. That, in essence, is a summary of practicum requirements, at least here at the University of South Carolina and within the Arnold School of Public Health's Department of Exercise Science. I'm sure you're thinking, "That's great, but HOW do I find or choose a practicum?" Well, read on. Taken directly from a practicum guide, the goal of this component of the MPH is to gain knowledge in planning, implementing, and evaluating a theory-based physical activity (PA) and public health program or initiative. To reach this goal, one is to include certain experiences in order to gain at least two competencies. These competencies include: assessing organizational and community needs for PA, developing and communicating PA messages, building PA coalitions, identifying PA resources, and so on. For my particular practicum in the PA realm, I choose competencies surrounding PA policy. Thus, being able to identify credible PA data sources, learning how to act as a PA policy advocate, and developing a draft policy statement became the emphasis of my practicum. While some departments require a practicum seminar class prior to participating in the actual practicum, others do not. In our Department of Exercise Science, we do not have such a class. As a result, my first piece of advice when looking for a practicum opportunity is to figure out your area of interest. Self-reflection is an important skill to gain throughout one's life, but this is especially important in graduate school. Public health is a diverse field, so figuring out where you mesh (or don't mesh) is important. Luckily, I had to do a practicum within the PA realm, which significantly narrowed my options. You will most likely have parameters such as this for your practicum as well. After reading and re-reading the practicum guide's goals for exercise science students, I talked to myself (the whole self-reflection thing) and then began to talk to other people. It can be very helpful to talk to students who have already completed a practicum. If you don't take away anything else from this article, please take this: networking is important. Additionally, networking isn't simply with career professionals or people with more education/experience than you. Networking can be with anyone! One of the coolest things about the world, in my personal opinion, is that we all have different life experiences, knowledge and skills. This fact enables us to help each other and, in turn, affect

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the world in different ways. My last piece of advice is to choose a practicum experience that might scare you a little. In the next paragraph, you will read about how I decided upon my specific practicum. Through networking (and graduate school in general), you will encounter people and situations that may initially frighten you. I urge you to face them anyway. We should never be afraid to continue learning about the world and ourselves through these types of experiences. Why did my practicum initially frighten me? I had little to no experience in what I was about to embark on! Originally, I wanted to do a practicum within the health communication/ education of PA realm, as this would have been in my comfort zone. My undergraduate degree is in communication studies, and I had worked in health education and recruitment for a graduate health program before coming back to graduate school, so a practicum in this field would have been a refinement of skills. Ironically, exploring a possible practicum in health communication led me to talk to Dr. Andrew Kaczynski, who is the chair of the Communications Committee for the PA Section of APHA. In turn, Dr. Kaczynski opened my request up to the rest of the PA Section's various committee chairs to see if any of the members had projects or ideas that might be of interest to me. This is when I connected with Dr. Daniel Bornstein, who is chair of the Policy Committee. I had always been interested in advocacy and policy work, since I also had a background in political science. I never realized I could do a practicum in the area! Dr. Bornstein told me about an idea to develop a policy statement supporting the National Physical Activity Plan's Public Health Sector strategies and tactics, and the rest is history. While we are still in the midst of developing and writing the actual policy statement, I have been especially excited throughout the process because our work will hopefully be adopted by the entire membership of APHA and accepted as an official stance. What a great contribution to the field of PA and public health that would be! I wish you much success if you pursue a practicum as well and look forward to growing the field of PA and public health with you well into the future. Daria Winnicka is a MPH candidate in the Department of Exercise Science at the University of South Carolina. She can be reached at winnicka@email.sc.edu. News from APHA PA Section Members

Development of a Smartphone Application to Improve the Quality of Physical Activity Data Collected Using Sensor-Driven Context-Sensitive Self-Report

By Genevieve Dunton, PhD, MPH

One of the most significant continuing challenges in the physical activity field is the need for valid and reliable measures of physical activity and sedentary behavior in adolescents for surveillance, epidemiological and intervention studies. Concern over the validity of retrospective self-report due to recall errors and biases, especially for youth, has led to an increase in the use of “objective” measures of physical activity and sedentary behavior, such as accelerometer-based activity monitors, heart rate monitors and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. Objective monitors, however, often yield missing, incomplete or unexplainable data that add complexity and cost to data cleaning and data analysis. Data may be incomplete for a variety of reasons, among them: (1) participants forget to wear or carry monitors; (2) participants remove monitors when they do not want to, or cannot, wear them; (3) participants remove monitors during sleep, bathing and swimming; and (4) device limitations such as low battery life, signal interference and malfunction.

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Adolescents recruited into objective physical activity monitoring studies will increasingly have “smartphones,” which are miniature computers with built in motion sensors and location-finding capabilities. Sophisticated programs can be easily installed on the phones (i.e., “apps”). The phones are rarely far from the adolescents, and adolescent affinity for the phones creates new opportunities for activity monitoring in surveillance and intervention studies. To address these challenges within physical activity measurement, our Real-Time Eating Activity and Children’s Health (REACH) Lab at the University of Southern California is developing a new software technology for smartphones through the Mobile Teen study (funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute). This new smartphone application can automatically detect and elicit information about activity, location change and data loss episodes through real-time Context-sensitive Ecological Momentary Assessment (CS-EMA) or end of day recall. This software has three novel components: (1) A feature that uses the mobile device’s built-in sensors to

detect major transitions in type of movement or location, after which timely, context-sensitive questions and reminders are triggered that will provide information about activity, location change and data loss episodes (see image above); (2) A second component that allows adolescents to interactively “fill in gaps” in their own data at the end of the day using cues from automatically detected major activity transitions, location change and data loss from the phone’s built-in sensors to jog memory about start and stop times of activity (see image to the right); and (3) Server-side software that remotely collects data from the app in real-time and provides researchers with a cost-efficient way to reduce missing data and improve characterization of transition in activity. This new smartphone software has the potential for deployment in large scale epidemiological and intervention studies to improve the quality of physical activity data. For more information about this smartphone application, please contact Dr. Genevieve Dunton (dunton@usc.edu). Genevieve Dunton is a member of the APHA Physical Activity Section and an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. Exercise is Medicine on Penn State University’s Campus By Melissa Bopp, PhD The American College of Sports Medicine’s Exercise is Medicine (EiM) on Campus campaign aims to make physical activity and exercise a standard part of healthy living and disease prevention and open a dialog between universities and public health officials. Students in the Penn State Kinesiology Club came to their professors with some grand ideas in mind — to bring EiM to Penn State’s campus of 44,000+ students in central Pennsylvania. A leadership team of students, faculty and staff set out to plan Exercise is Medicine week in November 2012.

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The vision for EiM week was to increase the awareness about the importance of physical activity among college students. This made our EiM on campus campaign a little different than many others out there in that we focused primarily on students. Our week included several main components: providing education about the benefits of physical activity, offering exercise events on campus, creating a strong online and social media presence, and hosting a celebrity speaker. Kines club members, as well as faculty and students from six different classes, helped make EiM week possible. Educational activities were primarily aimed at delivering concise but powerful messages about the benefits of exercise. “Stall stories” were included in residential halls, touting the mental health benefits of exercise, and stair prompt signs with our Nittany Lion mascot were created and placed all over campus (see poster on right). Students handed out 1,500+ pedometers with behavioral cues to skip the campus shuttle and walk to classes. Our Nittany Lion mascot wore a pedometer during a football game, and we had a contest for students to guess how many steps the lion took. An exercise flash mob was assembled during lunch hour in one of the main dining areas. We also partnered with University Health Services to deliver educational materials in our Student Union Building. Research presentations from national leaders in the field were also invited to speak on campus during EiM week.

Our exercise events on campus were the most planning-intensive but certainly were the most visible and well received. Four highly visible campus locations were chosen for exercise events. Each day included campus “celebrities” (coaches, athletes, administrators, mascot) exercising on equipment (stationary bikes, rowing ergometers) and students could have a chance to exercise next to a celebrity for 15 minutes. Quick activities (obstacle courses, circuits, fitness activities) were also offered for students who were passing by. Prizes, drawing, free food and water were certainly a big draw to these events.

To reach students, we built a strong online and social media presence. Our website http://pennstateeim.weebly.com/ was included on all of our educational materials, and a scannable QR code allowed easy access for smartphone users. Kines club students managed the Twitter feed, with hourly tweets about events, educational messages and behavioral prompts. A few months after EiM week, we kept students interested in the message by inviting Chris Powell, host of ABC’s Extreme Weight Loss Makeover, to give a talk. More than 1,500 students and community members showed up to hear him speak about his experiences.

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Our evaluation team from 2012 charted our successes and gave us some inspiration for events and activities this year. We are in the midst of planning for 2013 EiM week. We are expanding our activities and will have a presence during homecoming events, including handing out pedometers to parade attendees. We are looking forward to continuing this collaborative effort with students and faculty. If you have any questions or comments about Penn State’s EiM week, please contact Melissa Bopp at mjb73@psu.edu. Melissa Bopp is a member of the APHA Physical Activity Section and an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at The Pennsylvania State University. The “Activity is Good Medicine” Program — A community-based collaboration between a rural health system and a local YMCA By Rudolph Fedrizzi, MD This fall, Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene (CMC/DHK) and the Keene Family YMCA will add another dimension to their evidence-supported “Activity is Good Medicine” (AGM) program by including a pre- and post-program tablet-based health risk assessment tool. AGM is loosely based on the Exercise is Medicine Program that was developed by the American College of Sports Medicine. Primary care provider offices screen patients for their level of activity using a simple tool (based on the Stanford Brief Activity Survey) as a routine assessment during the intake process for appointments. Patients who demonstrate an insufficient level of physical activity are referred to a three-month individualized program at the Keene Family YMCA to establish a lasting activity habit. Once referred, an exercise program is designed for participants in a supportive, welcoming, non-judgmental environment. Fitness improvements are achieved through cardiovascular activities, strength training and attention to flexibility and balance. All participants receive a one-on-one consultation with a YMCA health coach for orientation to the YMCA facilities, exercise equipment and pool. The health coach will also complete an intake screening session (to include an exercise history screening), starting exercise and evaluation profile (to include fitness testing), a review of attainable goals and a recommendation for the best exercise routine to get started. The YMCA has also created a peer support group for motivation and social connection. A nutritionist is also available to participants for group education. This program is available at nominal cost to the patient (around $25). The YMCA waives its customary new membership fee and discounts its typical monthly charges. CMC/DHK pays approximately $75 per patient through a HIPPA-co mpliant contractual agreement with the YMCA. When the three-month program expires, patients are encouraged to continue their YMCA membership at the standard monthly rate. Participants with financial concerns after the initial program may apply for YMCA Scholarship assistance to help reduce the cost.

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Two separate pilots in 2012 and 2013 revealed positive participant outcomes, including improvements in biometric and fitness screening and qualitative measures of engagement, activation, and satisfaction. Results from the 2013 pilot showed 90 day weight loss of >4 percent of body weight and >8 percent in fitness measures, and a significant number of the participants stayed engaged with the YMCA after the program ended (approximately twice the typical YMCA retention rate). We believe the AGM Program can easily be adapted to other communities. For more information, contact: Rudy Fedrizzi, MD, Community Health Department, CMC/DHK 580 Court Street, Keene, NH 03431, rfedrizzi@cheshire-med.com, (603) 354-5400. Rudolph Fedrizzi is a member of the APHA Physical Activity Section and director of Community Health Clinical Integration at Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene, New Hampshire. SchoolsAlive! in Fargo-Moorhead By Stefanie Meyer, MS, CSCS As part of the CassClayAlive! initiative that focuses on healthy eating and active living in Cass County, North Dakota, and Clay County, Minnesota, SchoolsAlive! is putting the national Let’s Move! Active Schools model into practice (http://letsmoveschools.org/). By focusing on the five key elements to create school-wide change for health, two local professors have connected with the Dakota Medical Foundation and partnered with a number of local elementary schools to infuse 60 minutes of physical activity into each day. Dr. Jenny Linker, assistant professor in the department of Health, Nutrition, and Exercise Sciences at North Dakota State University in Fargo, N.D., and Dr. K risten Hetland, chair/assistant professor of physical education and health at Con cordia College in Moorhead, Minn., engaged their physical education students in the work with entire school systems. Physical activity can be everywhere; before school, after school, brain breaks in the classroom, and recess, in addition to physical education class. When asked about the success of SchoolsAlive!, Dr. Linker says “West Fargo schools are leaders at the national level; their enthusiasm is outstanding!” The SchoolsAlive! initiative was funded by a local DMF Breakthrough Idea grant at the end of 2012. The project is part of the overall goal in Cass and Clay counties to reduce overweight in children age 19 and younger by 20 percent by 2020. For more information about this project and others in our community that aim to meet this goal, visit http://www.dakmed.org/cass/school-wellness-policy-project/.

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Stefanie Meyer is a member of the APHA Physical Activity Section and a member of the CassClayAlive! Steering Committee. She is the MPH Program coordinator at North Dakota State University and can be reached at stefanie.meyer@ndsu.edu. Get involved in the development of a new reporting guideline for social and psychological interventions! An international initiative of researchers, journal editors and stakeholders in intervention studies is working with the Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Group to develop CONSORT-SPI: an official Extension for Social and Psychological Interventions. We are currently looking for participants for an upcoming Delphi process (starting mid-September 2013) to generate possible reporting standards for the guideline. Stakeholders involved in researching, publishing, funding, commissioning or providing public health interventions that aim to promote physical activity are invited to contact us to participate. Please email the Project Executive at CONSORT.study@spi.ox.ac.uk or complete the CONSORT-SPI participant form if you are interested! Further information about the project, please read this recent manuscript in AJPH.

News from APHA

APHA Annual Meeting

Join us in Boston from Nov. 2-6 for the APHA 141st Annual Meeting and Exposition. Our Section will have a strong presence at the meeting. View the sessions sponsored by our section by visiting the interactive Online Program. Search the program using keyword, author name or date. Don’t forget to stop by the Section and SPIG Pavilion in the Public Health Expo for more information about our Section activities. View the APHA Annual Meeting webpage for registration, housing and complete information on meeting activities. This is a meeting you don’t want to miss.

Don’t forget to download the new APHA Annual Meeting App available mid September. The app will allow attendees to view the Online Program, create a schedule, network with attendees, and search the expo hall and more. More information about the mobile app can be found online.

Public Health CareerMart

Employers and job seekers, join APHA CareerDay 2013 in Boston Nov. 2-6, for the opportunity to network with more than 10,000 public health professionals. CareerDay 2013 is the marketplace for employers and job seekers. Employers will have the opportunity to meet thousands of public health professional and qualified candidates for hire; job seekers will have the opportunity market their resumes, meet recruiters and sign up for professional career coaching sessions. Find out more from APHA’s at CareerDay 2013 or email

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careers@apha.org.

2013 Learning Institute Courses

APHA's Learning Institute (LI) pre-conference courses, presented on Saturday and Sunday prior to the APHA Annual Meeting, offer a wide range of professional development and continuing education opportunities: from a half-day course on “Video Production: Health Promotion via YouTube” and “Utilizing Text Messages in Health Education”; to a full-day interactive course on “Mastering, Managing and Measuring the Social Future of Public Health: Social Media, Social Technology and Social Engagement.”

Continuing Education Credits

The 2013 APHA Annual Meeting offers participants the opportunity to earn continuing education (CE) contact hour credits in four disciplines: CME (physicians and non-physicians), CNE, CPH, CHES and MCHES. Up to 12 CE credits can be earned for attending these two days of courses. Visit http://www.apha.org/meetings/highlights/LearningInstitutes for the full course listing, additional fee per course and CE credit information. Registration for the full conference and the LIs: http://www.apha.org/meetings/registration/.

New book: A Public Health Approach to Bully Prevention

A Public Health Approach to Bullying Prevention will serve as a practical, sustainable, cost-efficient strategy to address bullying. More importantly, it may be the best approach to providing legitimate and sustainable hope to our children at a time when bullying is becoming increasingly more difficult to tackle.

APHA Environment

APHA re-launches its environmental health website! The new website features timely resources on important health topics such as climate, transportation, food and chemical exposures, monthly conversations with leaders in the field and the latest environmental health news. Visit the website to access new reports and videos from APHA’s cutting edge communications project with the FrameWorks Institute, featuring recent findings on how the media talks about environmental health and how people on the street think about the field.

www.apha-environment.org

Are you reading APHA’s Public Health Newswire?

Stay connected with important public health issues facing communities across the country through APHA’s Public Health Newswire, an online news blog devoted to bringing you the

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latest news and information on what’s happening across the industry. We’re covering breaking news, tracking public health policy and delivering insights from leaders in the field. Plus, Public Health Newswire gives you a chance to be a part of the conversation. Share your perspectives on today’s most pressing public health issues with colleagues by commenting on our stories.

Sign up to our Public Health Newswire email digest or subscribe to our feed to receive daily updates on public health news that matters to you. Stay informed, get connected and let us know what you think