Yale-Griffin Prevention Dept Offers PHINDER Database Of Health Programs

DERBY —Prevention, health promotion, and chronic disease management programs have the potential to make a positive impact on the nation’s health status and save the nation trillions of dollars in unnecessary health care spending.

While wellness and prevention programs have been in existence for decades, they have never been shared in a comprehensive manner for large-scale uptake.

“A flood of factors into our daily lives contribute to the development of obesity and chronic diseases in children and adults alike,” according to David L. Katz, MD, MPH, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center who designed the project. “To stop the flood, we need to build a levee — and for everyone to be part of that process, they need to get their hands on a ‘sandbag’ that suits their situation. That’s just what PHINDER provides: health promotion programs for diverse settings, many of which are free, so that everyone can be part of the solution.”

The Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center (PRC) was established in 1998 through funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One of 37 such centers nationwide representing academic/community partnerships, the Yale-Griffin PRC is engaged in interdisciplinary applied prevention research in collaboration with community partners, federal, state, and local health and education agencies, and other universities. 

The goal for PRC is to develop innovative approaches to health promotion and disease prevention that will directly benefit the public’s health, first locally, and then nationally.

The New England Region PHINDER (Promising Health Interventions Inventoried by a Network of Diverse Experts for Regional Application) project is the first such program positioned to serve as an exciting national model to disseminate tested and effective, best-practice programs designed for a variety of settings, such as worksites, schools, communities, etc, to address the seven most prevalent chronic diseases.

Many promising health promotion practices of widely varying intensity have been devised for diverse settings; however, universal access to a detailed searchable inventory of such practices does not exist.  PHINDER was developed to do just that.

According to RADM Michael R. Milner, assistant surgeon general, HHS Regional Health Administrator, and PHINDER advisory board member, “PHINDER supports our departments’ national health care reform efforts that promote prevention practices at the community level and will help assist parents, teachers, policy makers, health leaders and other ‘prevention champions’ locate tools to empower positive change which promotes healthy living.”

The PHINDER clearinghouse includes program information supplied by faculty at the schools of public health, medicine, and nursing, as well as the six state health departments in the New England region.  PHINDER is available free of charge.

PHINDER was developed through a collaboration of the CDC-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease (PFCD) – CT Chapter, the Connecticut Cancer Partnership/Connecticut State Department of Public Health, and the commissioners of health in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont..

For more information, visit www.yalegriffinprc.org.