Panhandle Health District
8500 N. Atlas Road
Hayden, Idaho 83835
www2.state.id.us/phd1
Date: February 21, 2007
Contact:
Cynthia Taggart
Public Information Officer
(208) 415-5108
(208) 818-7288 (cell)
Released by: Jeanne Bock, Director
The Idaho Public Health Association has honored Panhandle Health District’s (PHD) Health Promotion team with its 2006 Excellence in Public Health Award. The association represents public health professionals throughout the state.
PHD’s Health Promotion team works to reinforce healthy living practices with programs on smoking cessation, asthma control, senior fitness, adolescent pregnancy prevention, dental hygiene and more. Team members are Joanna Adams, Bonnie Held, Brittany Baeumel and Mary Jo Sauber.
“This team works together for the good of public health,” says Tanya Chesnut, director of PHD’s Health Promotion division. “If they can do more than a contract calls for, they will do it. They are worthy of any award that has excellence tied to it.”
Adams supervises the team. She manages PHD’s Fit and Fall Program that helps seniors prevent injuries through fitness. A state contract requires PHD to operate at least five Fit and Fall sites. Adams operates 18 with no additional funding.
Held manages the Millennium Fund Tobacco Contract, Asthma Control and Child Care Health trainings. She’s one of the state’s few certified asthma educators and regularly expands special projects to attract more money to northern Idaho for asthma education.
With Sauber, Held built PHD’s smoking cessation program for pregnant women into the largest in Idaho, reaching more than 50 percent of the state’s pregnant smokers.
Baeumel manages the Adolescent Pregnancy and Prevention Contract. PHD is the only district in the state in which all school districts have used the Peers Encouraging Abstinent Kids (PEAK) program. Baeumel’s hard work led to that accomplishment and to her appointment to the Governor’s Coordinating Council for Families and Children.
Sauber manages contracts for oral health and diabetes. Twenty-seven percent of the children statewide who swish with fluoride at school live in the Panhandle School District. Sauber convinced every northern Idaho school district to participate in the School Mouth Rinse program.
Sauber also created a diabetes education program for northern Idaho in which more than 150 professionals participate each year.
PHD’s Board of Health will honor the Health Promotion Team at its meeting Thursday at 1 p.m. in its Hayden headquarters, 8500 N. Atlas Road.
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Photo: l-r Mary Jo Sauber, Joanna Adams, Bonnie Held, Brittany Baeumel and Board of Health Chairman Marlow Thompson