Research Results

The accreditation of public health departments is expected to play a significant role in strengthening the performance, effectiveness, and accountability of the nation’s public health system. After extensive study, a national voluntary accreditation program has been endorsed by leading public health organizations, including the American Public Health Association (APHA), Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), and the National Association of Local Boards of Health (NALBOH). 
 

This study evaluated whether vaccination mandates, either by hospital policy or state law, may increase flu vaccine coverage for healthcare workers. The study finds that vaccination rates were significantly related to mandated vaccination with termination for noncompliance and declination or noncompliance that results in consequences other than termination.

The Hatch-Waxman Act regulates competition between brand-name and generic drugs in the United States. This study examines a feature of the Act that has attracted great controversy but little systematic attention. “Paragraph IV” challenges are a mechanism for generic drug makers to challenge the patents of brand-name drug makers as a means to secure early market entry. The study first presents descriptive results that chart the rise of brand-name patent portfolios and Paragraph IV challenges.

This paper describes how the Philadelphia Police Department instituted a large-scale randomized controlled trial of foot patrol as a policing strategy and experienced 23 percent fewer violent crimes during the treatment period. The authors examine whether activities patrol officers were conducting might have produced the crime reduction. The activities of foot and car patrol officers research takes a closer look at what types are examined separately and differences between car patrol activities pre-intervention and during the intervention are explored.

Observers worry that generic patent challenges are on the rise and reduce the effective market life of drugs. A related concern is that challenges disproportionately target high-sales drugs, reducing market life for these “blockbusters.” To study these questions, this study examines new data on generic entry over the past decade. The results show that challenges are more common for higher sales drugs. The study also demonstrates a slight increase in challenges over this period, and a sharper increase for early challenges.

Overall annual influenza vaccination rate has slowly increased among health care workers but still remains below the national goal of 90 percent. One hundred fifty hospitals required influenza vaccination, 84 with consequences (wear a mask, termination, education, restriction from patient care duties, unpaid leave) and 66 without consequences for noncompliance. Hospitals whose mandates have consequences for noncompliance included a broader range of personnel, were less likely to allow personal belief exemptions, or to require formal declination.

The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. This study reviews a number of proposals intended to bolster drug development, including such financial incentives for pharmaceutical manufacturers as extending the effective patent life for new antibiotics.

The existence of different types of accreditation legal frameworks, embedded in complex and varying state legal infrastructures and political environments, raises important legal implications for the national voluntary accreditation program. The findings from the mapping study delineate the accreditation, certification/assessment, performance management, or quality improvement program currently in place and the type of legal framework supporting it.

This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman’s concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multi-level growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a decaying deterrent effect during the course of the experiment whereas those staffed for 12 weeks did not.

This paper explores associations between awareness of New Jersey’s HIV exposure law and the HIV-related attitudes, beliefs, and sexual and seropositive status disclosure behaviors of HIV-positive persons. The study finds 51 percent of participants knew about the HIV exposure law. This awareness was not associated with increased sexual abstinence, condom use with most recent partner, or seropositive status disclosure. Contrary to hypotheses, persons who were unaware of the law experienced greater stigma and were less comfortable with positive serostatus disclosure.