News

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a program that will support Native American communities to lead public health research to address overdose, substance use, and pain, including related factors such as mental health and wellness.

The Arizona Center for Rural Health was awarded two grants by the Health Resources and Services Administration to support health services in rural communities.
The first grant will provide $3.17 million over five years for the Arizona Rural Hospital Flexibility Program, which supports Critical Access Hospitals in rural areas with training, data collection, analysis and dissemination to improve the quality of patient care and operational performance. The program has been continuously funded for the past 26 years.

An Indian Health Service grant will help Indigenous nursing students pursue higher education while also building new tribal-academic-practice collaborations to improve the care of Native populations.

Federal investigators and tribal epidemiologists have documented a litany of obstacles keeping state and federal public health information from tribes, including confusion about data-sharing policies, inconsistent processes for requesting information, data that’s of poor quality or outdated, and strict privacy rules for sensitive data on health issues like HIV and substance misuse.