October 2014 Update

LGBT HealthLink

HealthLink hosted twowebinars to encourage LGBT inclusion in state tobacco proposals to CDC: one for Community Centers, titled “Coaching Your State – How To Include LGBT In Their 5 yr Tobacco Proposal”, and one for states about how to collaborate with and include local LGBT groups in their RFA’s. Reps from 37 states attended the statewebinar, and 25 people attended the Community Centerwebinar. As followup:
- We attended a meeting between Pennsylvania’s five community centers and the department of health reps. After advice at that meeting, the DOH has put aside money for local funding next year.!
- We’ve also worked with FL department of health reps to brainstorm several LGBT integration steps, including doing a statewide LGBT needs assessment next year.

We are collaborating with National Jewish quitline and North American Quitline Consortium to test an enhanced LGBT measure (based on feedback from quitline counselors who’ve administered the current one 100k times). We have approval from 5 states to live test the enhanced question and will be doing a webinar with all quitline reps in November.

Scout presented grand rounds at RI Department of Health. There were 35 attendees. He spoke on LGBT tobacco disparities.

Our Needs Assessment work continued with Arkansas and the four original Michigan sites completing their data collection, and a fifth Michigan site (Kalamazoo) beginning collection. Additionally, staff started working with Missouri (The GLO Center of the Ozarks) to get them started on Needs Assessment outreach plans. We are working to analyze the first data and create the initial reports now.

Technical assistance with PROMO Fund in Missouri has resulted in them moving from 37^th in the country on the Healthcare Equality Index to 6^th. See our Huffington Post story on it below to both showcase the success & see details of how to bring this success to your state.

We are preparing for rollout of our first-ever state LGBT tobacco report cards. We sent the draft report cards to state tobacco program representatives for their feedback. Finalized grades for all states will go public in November.

Our other major project is release of the new LGBT Healthcare Bill of Rights. The draft website was completed and we expect this to launch November 15. Check the website out at: http://healthcarebillofrights.org Do you want to get custom branded materials for your organization? Then please contact us to be a partner: HealthLink@lgbtcenters.org.

Our social media this month had an aggregate reach of 12,311 people on Facebook with 1222 clicks and 490 likes, shares and comments. Twitter got 115 retweets, 119 mentions, 59,767 impressions and 159 favorites this month.

October Blogs: (all titles are links)