The CRUSH Coalition acts to combat substance use disorder and improve mental health in St. Charles County. The CRUSH coalition is continuing its rebranding efforts by working to finalize its’ upcoming flagship leaflet, a comprehensive resource card to promote access to information and services for any questions/crises related to substance misuse.

Planning discussions have begun between CRUSH, the American Heart Association, PreventEd, and Preferred Family Healthcare to implement systems, policy, and environment interventions in St. Charles County schools. After big successes in decreasing cigarette smoking among teens in the last decade, vaping/e-cig use among youth has surged more recently. The goal of these discussions would be to enhance school policies/responses to students who are observed using vaporizer/e-cigarettes or exhibiting high risk of electronic nicotine use. This type of evidence-based intervention would likely be updating outdated policies to align with prevention of electronic nicotine use and establishing a more supportive (rather than punitive) approach to help students abstain from this type of substance use.

This week, the Workplace Wellness Action Team is finalizing and sending the participating certification program organizations their Insights Reports based on the results of the employee wellness surveys. Participants can use this collection of ideas and suggestions from our subject matter expert and professionals to refine their wellness programs. Surveys will be sent to each organization to understand what they think works well and what the CSWW team can improve. After this, participating organizations can set up private meetings to ask any questions and discuss how their wellness programs can best be developed. The action team will provide ongoing support as needed to each participant as we draw closer to the final reviews of the Healthy Workplace Award applications in March of 2021.