Facilitated by the Bureau of Family Health, the Louisiana Injury Prevention Strategic Action Plan weaves approaches and resources into a comprehensive and coordinated effort to prevent injuries and violence across the state. The plan uses a shared risk and protective factor approach, which focuses on the connections between different causes of injury and violence in prevention planning, partnerships, and programmatic efforts. This approach is combined with existing building blocks like evidence-based strategies already being implemented around the state for intervention and prevention.

Priority areas include: Bullying, Youth, and Teen Dating Violence; Suicide, Motor Vehicle Collisions (MVC); Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and Sexual Violence; Child Abuse and Neglect (CAN); Drowning; Homicide; Older Adult Falls; and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The plan considers how interventions effect change at four key personal and social levels — individual, relationship, community, and societal — to ensure maximum reach and impact. The Injury Prevention Strategic Action Plan also aligns with the public health model to ensure widespread adoption of prevention strategies.

Suggested audience: Government agencies, program planners, and injury prevention advocates

The Louisiana Healthy Homes and Blood Lead Surveillance System’s 2017 report presents screening and prevalence data for elevated lead levels on a state and parish level. The report uses data collected from several private laboratories and statewide clinics. Records containing residential information were included if the child was between 6 months and 6 years of age, in order to determine if the child lived in Louisiana at the time of the test. Findings from this report help to support and guide outreach and prevention efforts, screening recommendations and resource allocation.

Suggested audience: public health agencies and partners, physicians

This annual report provides a compilation of trends, quality indicators, and usage data for the Partners for Healthy Babies helpline, the eight websites managed by the Bureau of Family Health (BFH), the BFH social media pages (Facebook and Twitter), and the Louisiana Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program’s website. It serves to identify changes over time in how target audiences interact with the Partners for Healthy Babies campaign, the WIC campaign, Partners for Family Health resources, and helps guide the future directions of these communication channels.

The Louisiana Child Death Review Report compiles key findings from data collected over a three year period, including the top causes of infant and child death (broken down by age groups), comparisons between Louisiana rates and national averages, racial disparities in infant and child mortality rates,  and prevention recommendations. The 2016-2018 report also includes data on trends in infant and child mortality over time.

The report provides an overview of what the Office of Public Health, Bureau of Family Health and partner organizations are doing to prevent infant and child deaths around the state, and a section offering specific recommendations for children with special health needs. Data sources include Louisiana Vital Records and Statistics and findings from state and local Child Death Review panels, which review the circumstances that contribute to infant and child deaths in Louisiana.

Suggested Audience: public health agencies/organizations, policy makers

This report shares the Louisiana Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review (LA-PAMR) Committee’s findings from their review of pregnancy-associated deaths occurring in 2017, including findings related to racial disparities, and resulting recommendations for prevention. LA-PAMR works to quantify and understand pregnancy-associated deaths in order to create actionable, comprehensive recommendations to prevent future deaths.

Pregnancy-associated deaths include:

• Pregnancy-related deaths: The death of a woman during pregnancy or within one year of the end of pregnancy from a pregnancy complication, a chain of events initiated by the pregnancy, or the aggravation of an unrelated condition by
  the physiologic effects of pregnancy (example cause of death: preeclampsia or eclampsia).
• Pregnancy-associated, but not related deaths: The death of a woman during pregnancy or within one year of the end of pregnancy from a cause that is not related to pregnancy (example cause of death: car crash).
• Pregnancy-associated, but unable to determine relatedness deaths: A pregnancy-associated death where the cause of death is unable to be determined as “pregnancy-related” or “pregnancy-associated, but not related” (example cause of death: suicide).