Community Outreach

Aug. 20, 2021

23 Health Professions students, faculty and staff help new students move in

Aug. 20, 2021 Twenty-three Health Professions students, faculty and staff helped students move into residence halls Aug. 19. Health Professions Dean Kristofer Hagglund, left, and Loren Bauerband, Health Sciences assistant professor, center, help a student move in at Southwest Village.

May 15, 2021

More mental health support in Boone County schools part of new agreement with Mizzou

May 15, 2021 A new agreement among Boone County school leaders and University of Missouri faculty who direct the Family Access Center of Excellence is designed to better coordinate school-based and community-based mental health services for children. The agreement was signed Friday by officials at the Boone County Government Center. “We’re hiring 10 family intervention specialists who will be embedded in the schools,” said Aaron Thompson, director of the MU School of Social Work and associate director of the Missouri Prevention Sciences Institute. Read the complete story by the Columbia Daily Tribune.

May 14, 2021

MU Family Access Center of Excellence to provide mental health support to Boone County schools

May 14, 2021 MU Family Access Center of Excellence (FACE) of Boone County and Boone County school leaders signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will outline enhanced mental health support for approximately 24,000 school-aged children and their families. These services are made possible by a ¼-cent tax passed by citizens of Boone County in 2012, which created the Boone County Community Services Department’s Services Fund. The MOU between FACE and Boone County schools will allow FACE to create tailored support for children, classrooms, school buildings, and school districts across Boone County. In 2021, FACE merged with the Boone County…

March 22, 2021

Crisis Intervention Training reduces stigma of mental illness in prisons

March 22, 2021 Before joining the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri, Professor Kelli E. Canada worked as a community clinical social worker in Chicago. There, many of her clients struggled with mental illness and were dealing with long stints in the prison system. What she discovered was corrections officers play an important role in prisoners’ lives, but often don’t understand how to deal with behaviors associated with mental illness. With that in mind, Canada partnered with the Missouri Department of Corrections (MODOC) to study how adjusting de-escalation techniques could improve corrections officers’ interactions with inmates with mental…

Oct. 6, 2020

Adapting for Accessibility

It was an aha moment when Bill Janes, a faculty member in the occupational therapy department, learned about Go Baby Go, a national network of students and professionals who modify ride-on toy cars for toddlers with limited mobility. “I realized this is why I became an OT, both because of how the kids responded to Go Baby Go and how it brought out a maker tendency in me,” Janes says. “I like to fix things and make them better for people.”  Janes established Mizzou’s Go Baby Go chapter, a campus-wide collaboration that includes students in OT, art, physical therapy…

Oct. 6, 2020

Kicking the Habit

The Marlboro Man might be long gone, but smoking and nicotine use in the Show-Me State live on at surprisingly high rates, says Jenna Wintemberg, BA ’10, MPH ’12, PhD ’17, assistant teaching professor of health sciences. An alarming 19 percent of Missouri’s adults smoke. Up to 50 percent of Missouri high school students have tried tobacco or electronic cigarettes, which pack lots of nicotine and come with the risk of pneumonia and respiratory failure. “The numbers for e-cigarettes keep going up and up and up,” she says. Wintemberg, a nationally certified tobacco treatment specialist, developed Adolescent Cessation in Every…

Oct. 6, 2020

Celebrity Therapist

James McCorkle has used a wheelchair for most of his six years of life, and, for much of that time, he has been a client at the School of Health Professions’ PhysZOU clinic. That’s where he met physical therapy student Mark Weleaga, who quickly realized that McCorkle needed to improve his wheelchair skills. “During my first session with James, we had to encourage him a lot to get him to do different wheelchair skills and play games,” Weleaga says. So, for help, he went straight to the top — Mizzou’s wheelchair basketball team. “I was hoping to make therapy fun.”…

Oct. 6, 2020

The Road to Recovery

In 2018, opioid use disorder killed 1,132 Missourians, a rate well above the national average. Communities statewide need access to providers who can help them deal with the problem. In response, health psychology chair Laura Schopp, MA ’91, PhD ’95, is using a new $1.2 million grant to expand an internship program that deals with the problem, particularly in underserved communities. Opioid use disorder occurs in about 29 percent of patients who have been prescribed drugs for short-term pain relief but find it difficult to use them as intended, Schopp says. “Health psychology comes to this arena with great skills…

Aug. 10, 2020

Masters Students Help Fill Critical Need for Case Investigators in Boone County

Missouri has entered its sixth month of navigating the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and for dozens of health departments across the state, CARES Act funding has been slow to arrive. That means crucial public-health positions like contact tracers and case investigators have been left unfilled. So, Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services has found one creative stop-gap – Masters in Public Health student volunteers.