ARDEN HANDLER: Good morning. Welcome, everyone. I’m Arden Handler from the University of Illinois School of Public Health Maternal and Child Health Training program and I’m very, very happy to welcome you today to our 18 th Annual MCH Leadership Conference: Translating Research into MCH Practice. This is the first in a second round of funding of three years of conferences focused on the theme of translating research into practice.
We have had this grant previously, as a regional conference grant and what we noticed over the last few years is that we started to--we used to be able to get all the folks from state and local health agencies in Region V to come, and as it got more and more difficult for state and local health agency folks to travel, we noticed that folks were coming from all over the country, and so when we applied for our funding we decided to go--make this a national conference. And so this the first time that we’re a national conference and, in fact, even though we’re small in numbers because it is so difficult for people to travel and there are so many meetings, we have people from all over the nation here with us today.
There are attendees from 16 states and Puerto Rico , Illinois , Indiana , Michigan , Wisconsin , Nebraska , Minnesota , Ohio , Kansas , Missouri , New York , Maryland , Mississippi , Delaware , D. C., Georgia , Florida and the Puerto Rico Health Department. Did I leave out anybody from any state? I mentioned you all, okay, and we have about 125 persons in attendance. The good news is that even though we’re small in number here, we think we have an excellent conference and in addition we’re videotaping the main sessions. We’re no longer simulcasting. We used to do the simultaneous Web casting and what we’ve found is that nobody ended up actually watching simultaneously, but over the course of the year we probably get about 1,000 hits on our Web site. So we’ve decided to just videotape it and for your colleagues who are unable to make the conference today there will be access to the main plannery sessions and a keynote speaker on the *CADE Web site. I’m sure there’s information about that in your packet.
I also want to remind everyone that continuing education credits are available for physicians, nurses, dieticians and social workers. Please ask at the registration desk for more information, the proper forms and sign-in sheets. Somebody did ask us this morning if this was only if you were from Illinois . No, no matter where you’re from you’re able to get those credits.
The way the places were laid out, we’re here for this keynote session today but when we finish we’ll have a half an hour break and as you notice this is a beautiful place, so we encourage you to get a snack and walk outside. We do have sunny weather. It’s still warming up a bit and take, you know, try to do part of your 10,000 steps. See how many steps you can take and then come back in and the workshops are going to be about another 500 steps. They’re actually down and around--it’s a little bit difficult to find, so we have students who are posted, who will be able to help you get to those sessions and then join us for lunch, immediately after the break-out sessions in the prairie foyer at 1:00 P.M.
Immediately following lunch is a second plannery session followed by three more break-out sessions and then we’ll be having a reception at the end of the day in the Q Room. And we’ll be back in this room tomorrow morning for breakfast at 8:00 A.M. and then plannery session two at 8:45 .
As always we always want people to make sure they evaluate what we’ve offered, so evaluation forms are located in the back of your programs. They’re on yellow sheets of paper, for each session and then there’s also, of course, an overall conference evaluation form. And please, please, please fill-out the evaluation forms. It really does help us figure out if we’re on the mark in doing what we’re supposed to be doing.
We also have from the very get-go, four years ago, associated with this conference we started an MCH Conference List Serve. I don’t know how many of you participated in that Conference List Serve but on a weekly basis we--just like the MCH alert--we scan the research literature and send you updates. And I actually read both and I print both out and last night I was doing my share of February, March and April. I never get a chance to do them and I was doing them last night, instead of reading them in the New York Times, and I realized, you know, I looked at them and I was really, really quite impressed because most of the time what we find is that there’s overlap maybe between a couple on the *Infemer List Serve and the ones on the MCH List Serve, but almost to the one, the ones that are on ours are, in fact, actually different, and so you should be doing both. They’re very interesting. We do about three or four articles summarized per week, so if you’d like to sign up for that list serve there’s information in your packet, and you can always come to the desk as well.
This morning we were supposed to have a welcome from our dean. I bet you she got lost, but we were also having a dual welcome from our dean and Dr. Steve Saunders, who’s our MCH Director. He’s Associate Director of the Office of Family Health and the Illinois Department of Human Services. And Steve is a wonderful partner of the University of Illinois School of Public Health and many of us in the room work very closely with him. And we are happy that he’s here to greet you today and he’s also going to share a little bit of his thinking about translation of research into practice and then when he’s done, if the dean comes I’ll introduce her, and if not then I’ll introduce Lisa Simpson.
Thank you very much and have a great time.