Ensuring Healthy Futures 
for adolescent and young adult males 

June 12, 2013 Update

Welcome to Healthy Futures E-News
 
Greetings!   -

Welcome to the third issue of our newsletter. You are receiving it because of your work to improve the health of adolescent and young adult males. This newsletter is a part of our campaign to insure that adolescent and young adult males have access to and are afforded the care they need to live healthy and productive lives free from preventable disease, violence, trauma and other risk factors.

The project is a a multi-year effort that aims to promote health among young men through the creation and dissemination of comprehensive clinical recommendations for health care professionals and programs that interact with them. The project is a collaborative and interdisciplinary undertaking among a range of stakeholders in young men's health. 

We hope you will find the information you find here to be insightful as well as useful and will pass it along to your colleagues.

Dennis

Dennis Barbour, Co-Founder
Healthy Futures Announces New Advisory Council Members

  

The Healthy Futures project is honored and pleased to announce three new members of its Advisory Council. They are Lee Warner, PhD, MPH, Associate Director of Science, Division of Reproductive Health, CDC, Maggie Blackburn, MD, Florida State University College of Medicine, and David Greenberg, MD, President of the Canadian Society for the Study of the Aging Male,  Dr. Warner brings years of experience with CDC reproductive health programs and Dr. Blackburn brings deep experience in the area of school-based health care. Dr. Greenberg has been heavily involved with male health care issues in Canada. 

  

In the Field: New Research and Resources
 
Adolescent Patient Care and Education

Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have just released Effective Clinical Interviewing of Adolescent Boys and Young Men, a series of vignettes for medical and mental health providers aimed at improving their communication skills and facilitating their ability to effectively interview adolescent boys and young men during clinical visits. The project involved task force meetings and consensus building, a review of the literature, focus groups of adolescent boys and young men, filming of vignettes from office settings, and development of online access and a teaching CD. It can be accessed here.
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The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has released the Guy's Guide to Birth Control, a series of brief and entertaining videos that stars a guy explaining to young guys how contraception works. 
 
Recent Studies of Adolescent Youth
 
The University of Southern California has recently released The New Adolescents: An Analysis of Health Conditions, Behaviors, Risks and Access to Services Among Emerging Young Adults.

The principle author is Lawrence Neinstein, MD, FACP. His goal in producing the chart book is to provide health care providers, health care networks and vendors, institutions, and policy makers with the data they need to make informed decisions about broad health care coverage and health prevention interventions in emerging young adults age 18 to 26. Youth in this age range face greater behavioral and non-behavioral health risks than either adolescents aged 12-17 or young adults aged 26-34. Overall, emerging young adults have the highest rates of motor vehicle injury and death, homicide, mental health problems, sexually transmitted infections and substance abuse.  This age group also has the least access to care and has the highest uninsured rate in the United States.

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The Interagency Working Group for Youth Programs has just released two two reports Health and Health Care in the Transition from Adolescence to Young Adulthood and Adolescents and the Affordable Care Act. The first contains detailed, gender-specific data on health status and health services. The second contains a comprehensive review of how the ACA affects adolescents.

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An older report, issued last year Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System: Selected 2011 National Health Risk Behaviors and Health Outcomes by Sex, provides foundational data for efforts to expand health care services to adolescent males. The detailed report contains often chilling information on health risk behaviours for adolescents.

 

News Notes

  


BCH has developed a custom-built PHR with separate accounts for patients and parents. Bourgeois wrote, "The parent has sole access to the patient's portal until the patient turns 13, at which point both the parent and the patient can have access. ... At 18 years, the patient becomes the sole owner of the portal account, and we deactivate the parent's link (unless we receive court documents stating that the parent remains the medical guardian)."


Will 2013 be the year of the mobile app? Pundits seem to think so, and the prediction holds true for healthcare professionals and consumers alike. Although developers have come up with several apps to help clinicians diagnose and manage disease, the use of medical apps among consumers is set to take center stage, especially in light of new patient engagement requirements that are part of the government's Meaningful Use Stage 2 program.
 

About Healthy Futures

Adolescent and young adult males have unique, unmet health care needs in a number of areas, including sexual, reproductive and mental health, trauma and violence. The mission of the Ensuring Healthy Futures project is to engage a range of health care leaders, organizations and Federal agencies in a collaborative effort to develop and disseminate comprehensive clinical practice guidelines that will address these health care needs.

 
Who we are

The project is coordinated by The Boys Initiative and is guided by the project's Steering Committee and Advisory Council. The project has engaged over 50 organizations in the effort, many of which will become project partners.
 
Resources we provide
 
In addition to serving as a hub for information exchange among project participants, the Ensuring Healthy Futures project maintains an interactive online compendium of research and information on adolescent and young adult male health, sponsors webinars and conferences and provides access to experts in the areas the project addresses.

  

Join  Us  

 

Join us by telling us about your interest and how we can help you in your work.  E-mail Dennis Barbour, The Boys Initiative, or reach out to him at 202-841-7475

 

 

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