Department News

New Faculty Member joins DFPM-RED

Dr. Kanna Lewis has joined DFPM-RED as an Assistant Professor as of July 1. Dr. Lewis received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Maryland and published five peer-reviewed manuscripts while pursuing her doctoral degree. She previously was employed at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she developed and implemented various term structure models used for simulation, decomposition analysis, and evaluation of key metrics such as inflation expectation, term premia, expected short rate, and risk measures.

Dr. Lewis will continue current projects with Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) as well as new projects with DFPM-RED’s Dr. Lorraine McKelvey.

ACHI Bio

KATV Features New Resource for Parents During Covid-19

DFPM-RED’s Dr. Nikki Edge recently appeared on KATV to talk about a new resource for early care and education professionals and the children and families they serve. New Health Department guidelines now require that teachers caring for young children wear masks. While this is important for health and safety reasons, it can be confusing and upsetting to young children. Young children often have a hard time recognizing loved ones who change their appearance (for example, by shaving a beard or changing a hairstyle) and masks are a big change! Other children associate masks with ‘bad guys’ from the cartoons or have memories of scary Halloween masks.

The DFPM RED team collaborated with colleagues at A-State and ARBEST to develop a mask story primarily for teachers and parents of children under the age of 6. This story helps prepare children for what they will experience with their teacher (or other adults) and helps them understand that masks are safe and not scary. With the help of DHS, this story is being printed for distribution to every licensed child care program in AR.

See the KATV story here.

DFPM-RED Early Childhood Education Programs go online during pandemic

Much of DFPM-RED’s activity surrounding early childhood projects have met the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic by moving online. Read the full story here.

CHE Staff Secures Large Donation for Prison Breastfeeding Program

March 2, 2020 | Incarcerated women who are new breastfeeding moms at the J. Aaron Hawkins Sr. Center in Wrightsville, Arkansas, will have access to over 200 pounds of breastfeeding supplies recently donated by Medela, a leading manufacturer of breast pumps in the United States.

The donation came about through UAMS’ partnership with the Hawkins’ Growing Together program. Growing Together was formed to support the needs of incarcerated pregnant and postpartum women in Arkansas. It includes a lactation program, prenatal education classes, and a mental health support group. Childbirth support will launch soon as part of a pilot grant provided by UAMS’ Translational Research Institute.

Melissa Zelinski, Ph.D. with donated boxes from Medela.

Marybeth Curtis, B.S.N., a nurse educator in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, saw the need for breastfeeding supplies and contacted Medela.

Medela gave hospital-grade breast pumps, storage bags, maternity and nursing shirts, lanolin, and other products to the new breastfeeding initiative. The items were donated through Hope Rises, a Little Rock non-profit that offers services to women impacted by addiction, trauma and incarceration.

Annemarie McGahagan, SPAN nutrition coordinator at UAMS, is breastfeeding coordinator for the CDC State Physical Activity and Nutrition grant that helps support Growing Together.

“When Annemarie shared with me the need for breast pumps and supplies for the Growing Together program, my first response was to reach out to Medela,” said Curtis. “I have always been amazed at their generosity. I have learned that acts of charity are waiting all around us once you make the need known.”

Melissa Zielinski, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the UAMS College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, spearheads UAMS’ involvement with Growing Together.

Board members of Little Rock non-profit, Hope Rises.

“Gender-responsive programs like Growing Together are critical. Many people don’t realize that over 75% of incarcerated women are of childbearing age and about 4% are pregnant at intake to prison. Few prisons have specialty services available to meet incarcerated pregnant women’s needs. It will take time, but we are working toward that goal,” said Zielinski.

All pregnant women at the Hawkins Unit receive their routine pre- and postnatal care and deliver their babies at UAMS.

Other groups have joined in the Growing Together initiative: UAMS lactation specialists, the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, doctoral-level psychology student interns from UAMS and the University of Central Arkansas who co-lead mental health support groups, retired RNs with the Presbyterian Women USA who teach prenatal classes for the women, and one volunteer who offered to sew lactation capes for the women who would like to use them when breastfeeding during visitation.

For more information, contact Zielinski at mjzielinski@uams.edu.

DFPM-RED Faculty Member Awarded R-21 NIH Grant

Dr. Taren Swindle of UAMS’ Dept of Family and Preventive Medicine, Research and Evaluation Division (DFPM-RED) was recently awarded her first R-21 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The R21 grant mechanism is intended to encourage exploratory/developmental research by providing support for the early and conceptual stages of project development. A brief description of the awarded research is below:

Sustainability of Nutrition and Physical Activity Interventions in Childcare

Effective prevention and intervention programs are needed to increase adherence to cancer prevention guidelines to, in turn, reduce cancer incidence at the population level. Programs that are sustained over many years are likely to have the greatest impact to that end. This proposal will identify predictors of sustainability of nutrition and physical activity programs in childcare and develop sustainability strategies to support prevention programs in this setting.

Project HEAL in the spotlight in Arkansas’ only statewide paper.

UAMS DFPM-RED’s Project HEAL was featured in a story in today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The project launched this year, in partnership with Little Rock nonprofit Better Community Development. The project is funded by a $2.5 million federal grant.

Read the full article HERE.

Home-Visiting Support for Low-Birth-Weight Preterm Infants

UAMS Department of Family and Preventive Medicine (DFPM) and the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI) recently published the following report connected to DFPM-RED faculty member Dr. Lorraine McKelvey’s work with Arkansas Home Visiting Networks.

Infants born preterm and with a Low Birth Weight (LBW) have a greater risk for long-term health issues than infants who are born full-term. To reduce that risk and foster better health outcomes, the Following Baby Back Home (FBBH) program offers families of these infants additional support after their discharge from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) through health-centered home visiting services.

This evaluation demonstrates that infants enrolled in FBBH receive more of their suggested childhood vaccinations and have a lower mortality rate than similar infants (matched control group) who are not enrolled in FBBH.

Link to Full Report

‘Stakeholder-Selected Strategies to Support Implementation of WISE’

The UAMS Department of Dietetics and Nutrition will host this presentation featuring DFPM-RED faculty member Taren Swindle, Ph.D. on Thursday, Jan. 9. The presentation will discuss implementation strategies for DFPM-RED’s WISE, a project which models, teaches, and promotes healthy food attitudes in programs that serve children preschool to elementary.

DFPM-RED’s TIPS team releases public Annual Report

The DFPM-RED TIPS team just finished their public-facing annual report today and are excited to share both the results and their new look!

Two years into executing their new evaluation framework, TIPS is seeing impressive survey results and app use statistics that are providing evidence for TIPS’ effectiveness as well as opportunities for growth.

Read the 2018-2019 report here.

About TIPS:

TIPS is a new, innovative parenting education program for parents of children ages birth to 5 years. With the TIPS training and toolkit, people working with parents can

Share recent research through brief, family-friendly messages.
Educate parents without parenting classes.
Respond to parents’ concerns and tailor parenting information to individual families.

TIPS also hosts Naptime Academy, free online professional development for childcare professionals.

WISE receives strongest recommendation from SNAP-ED

You can now find DFPM-RED’s WISE listed as a SNAP-Ed approved intervention on the SNAP-Ed website.

WISE is listed as “research-tested” which is SNAP-ED’s strongest recommendation.

See the WISE SNAP-Ed Toolkit page here.

About the SNAP-Ed Toolkit:

“The Interventions component of the SNAP-Ed Toolkit helps state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify and implement evidence-based obesity prevention and policy, systems, and environmental change (PSE) interventions to include in SNAP-Ed Plans. These interventions help agencies comply with the requirement that state SNAP-Ed Plans must include multi-level interventions or public health approaches that reach low-income households most impacted by health disparities.

Identification of interventions appropriate for SNAP-Ed Plans has involved the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research, the Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Networks and Other Implementing Agencies, and the Center for Training and Research Translation. The interventions included span the continuum of scientific evidence from research-tested interventions to practice-tested interventions to emerging interventions. A peer-review process was used to examine the evidence and assess evaluation findings, reach, and the potential for scaling up the interventions.”