How Policy Improves Health.

A discussion of health equity should be intricately examined in policy and practice discourse about the healthcare industry. This article addresses health equity with strategies to institutionalize it through policy implementation. This discourse is relevant to social work because social workers are charged with elucidating conditions that are maniacal and disadvantageous to racial groups, undocumented workers, immigrants and women. Social workers engaged in policy practice should consider how these stakeholders are excluded from health equity, because of the lack of transformative policy implementation that addresses industry practices that encourage disparity and maintain equity. This article hopes to provide a helpful view of health equity.

Adolescent preventive health and team-games-tournaments: five decades of evidence for an empirically based paradigm.

The problematic behaviors of teenagers and the subsequent negative consequences are extensive and well documented: unwanted pregnancy, substance abuse, violent behavior, depression, and social and psychological consequences of unemployment. In this article, the authors review an approach that uses a cooperative learning, empirically based intervention that employs peers as teachers. This intervention of choice is Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT), a paradigm backed by five decades of empirical support. The application of TGT in preventive health programs incorporates elements in common with other prevention programs that are based on a public health orientation and constitute the essential components of health education, that is, skills training and practice in applying skills. The TGT intervention supports the idea that children and adolescents from various socioeconomic classes, between the ages of 8 and 18 and in classrooms or groups ranging in size from 4 to 17 members, can work together for one another. TGT has been applied successfully in such diverse areas as adolescent development, sexuality education, psychoactive substance abuse education, anger control, coping with depression and suicide, nutrition, comprehensive employment preparation, and family intervention. This article reviews the extensive research on TGT using examples of successful projects in substance abuse, violence, and nutrition. Issues are raised that relate to the implementation of preventive health strategies for adolescents, including cognitive aspects, social and family networks, and intervention components.

Living in poverty in America today.

No statistician, social scientist or tarot card reader is needed to attest that the gap between the rich and poor in America is increasing. Further, most Americans don't care that much about it. There are also more rich people today living in the U.S. and there are more people living in poverty. Between 2000 and 2002, the number of Americans living in poverty increased by nearly 3 million to 34.6 million. Of these, 12% (or about one half a million persons) are living extreme poverty and many are children, with 16.7% likely to be poor (National Association of Social Workers, 2003).