Judy Vorfeld’s Office Support Services

Yes, but you may safely drop the “e” at the end of “Madame.” The rules as of 2010 have changed. According to The Gregg Reference Manual, Tenth Edition, by William A. Sabin, if you don’t know the names of anyone in a large organization, but know there are both men and women, use “Dear Sir or Madam” rather than “To Whom It May Concern,” or “Ladies and Gentlemen” or “Gentleman and Ladies.” Do not use “Gentlemen” alone, unless it is an organization made up of men. You may also omit the salutation. (Section 1340)

Arizona Center for Disability Law Board awarded Renaldo Fowler an award for 25 years of service at a January 29 Board Meeting held at the Disability Empowerment Campus. Fowler, a Senior Staff Advocate, is a highly respected Arizona advocate who specializes in special education. During the meeting, he also provided seclusion and restraint training for the board.

During the meeting, the board approved five new members “All bring significant leadership and expertise in a variety of disability areas,” says executive director Peri Jude Radecic. “For example, Cyrus Martinez is an employment lawyer, and Mark Mendibles, Tucson, is a webmaster and former member of the Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities, and fully understands the DD Act and Network. He also receives services from the Arizona Division of Developmental Disabilities.

“Art Gode, Kingman, and Loretta Cheeks, Peoria, are parents of adult sons with developmental disabilities. Gode is very well connected in the northwest corner of Arizona, and Dr. Cheeks is a Engineering Technical Lead/Project Lead with General Dynamics, Scottsdale. Attorney Wendy Akbar, Phoenix, is the current chair of the State Bar Committee on Persons with Disabilities in the Legal Profession.”

The ACDL Board meets quarterly and is comprised of diverse members representing all parts of Arizona, numerous disabilities, and disabilities of family members. It also sponsors a social networking site, http://acdlaw.ning.com/, which unites people interested in advocating for disability rights from around the globe, says Radecic. Membership is growing daily.

Find Arizona Center for Disability Law’s website here.

My friend, Donnie Kanter Winokur, relentless advocate for people with disabilities, reminded me that this week TV airs two shows that are of great interest: Front of the Class, written by Brad Cohen, and HBO’s ‘Temple Grandin’ Offers Inside Look At Autism.

FRONT OF THE CLASS, the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation starring Patricia Heaton (”Everybody Loves Raymond”), Treat Williams (”Everwood”) and Jimmy Wolk (”The Spiral Project”), will air on CBS Television Networks on February 6, 2010. The drama is based on the true story written by Brad Cohen who, after being challenged by Tourette’s syndrome from a very young age, defies all odds to become a gifted teacher. Brad reminds us all that dreams can come true!

As a child with Tourette syndrome, Brad Cohen was ridiculed, beaten, mocked, and shunned. Children, teachers, and even family members found it difficult to be around him. As a teen, he was viewed by many as purposefully misbehaving, even though he had little power over the twitches and noises he produced, especially under stress. Even today, Brad is sometimes ejected from movie theaters and restaurants.

Temple Grandin offers an inside look at Autism. She grew up to be a world-renowned expert on the handling of livestock and arguably the most famous person with autism in the world. Read more about her at Disability Scoop.

Guest post by Ted Rushton

Six libraries in Phoenix will close due to city budget cuts, another element of the effort by Mayor Phil Gordon to transform the city into a diversified high-tech center of America’s economic future.

It’s typical Phoenix. Last week, the story of the cuts to city programs got half-a-page coverage in ‘The Arizona Republic.’ Last week, a football player retired; the story got four pages in the next day’s paper, plus a special six-page section on Sunday. The newspaper doesn’t run Phoenix; it merely tries to reflect what it considers important to its readers.

Football, not libraries.

As a baseball fan, I’ve watched fans stand in silence before the game, listening to the national anthem. It never affects the game. It reflects what people consider important. Likewise, 10 pages for a football player. Half-a-page for library closings, plus a dozen or so parks, senior centers and other people-centered facilities. It reflects what newspaper readers consider important.

The 15 library system faces a 19 percent cut in funds, largest of any department. The city’s 90 senior executives, who utterly failed to see the collapse of the local economy which began in the fall of 2006, will get a 2 percent cut. No executive layoffs are planned.

It’s not just Phoenix. Mesa, the state’s third largest city, is also making major cuts to police services and other civic programs. Yet, Mesa is offering $84 million to build a new ballpark exclusively for the Chicago Cubs, who will use it for only one month of the year.

What is a library? Isaac Asimov explains, “I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.

“For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself,” Asimov wrote.

On Sunday, the paper had several pages to a “Let’s Grow Jobs” feature in response to Arizona’s economic decline, worse than Michigan and exceeded only by Nevada. For decades, Arizona’s economy was based on illegal migrants in construction, warehousing and landscaping. The $1.4 billion trolley 20-mile car line, which gets $3 in taxes for every $1 in fares, is almost untouched.

Trolley cars reflect the mayor’s ego. Libraries house ideas, as abundant as lemons on a well-watered tree but with all the fruits of the world in one small plot of land. Sports is fun, Arizona emphasizes the pay-for-fun approach rather than do-it-yourself fun.

Arizona has four major league sports teams; but, Phoenix will cancel its summer baseball program for youths.

What is a library? Gerald Manley Hopkins describes it thus:

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pierced — fold, fallow, and plow;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise Him.

What is a library? It is ideas. A town without a library is like a baseball team that never practices. In recent years, Arizonans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build some of the nation’s finest baseball spring training facilities; they are gems, well worth the money and well worth the commitment to the sports future. But great cities have more than playgrounds.

Ideas deserve as much consideration, care and commitment. In Phoenix, the tangible value is concrete, steel and asphalt. Conservatives trust concrete. Progress is rubberized asphalt. Ideas are dangerous, as William Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

An original idea? Hardly. Shakespeare cribbed it from a comment by Julius Caesar as written by Plutarch, which he could discover only because of a library, “It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and hungry-looking.”

Perhaps, like Caesar, the mayor fears libraries because they house ideas.

“I really think old Asimov hit the mark,” says my friend and mentor, Dan D. Cook. He sent me the following quotation, and it’s worth repeating.

(Cook is past president of Friends of the Phoenix Public Library, and a powerful advocate for a healthy library system throughout our city, county, state, and nation.)

“I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.” - Isaac Asimov

I recently received a 2010 calendar from Ted and Martha Vorfeld, who live on the Big Island. It’s a Lava Calendar of work by Bruce Omori and Tom Kuali`i. It is exquisite, impeccable, brilliant photography. Do visit their website at http://www.extremeexposure.com/index.php.

When someone develops an infection at a hospital or other patient care facility that they did not have prior to treatment, this is referred to as a healthcare-associated (sometimes hospital-acquired) infection (HAI).

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a global crisis affecting both patients and healthcare workers.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at any point in time, 1.4 million people worldwide suffer from infections acquired in hospitals.

A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report published in March-April 2007 estimated the number of U.S. deaths from healthcare associated infections in 2002 at 98,987.

The risk of acquiring healthcare-associated infections in developing countries is 2-20 times higher than in developed countries.

Afflicting thousands of patients every year, HAI often leads to lengthening hospitalization, increasing the likelihood of readmission, and adding sizably to the cost of care per patient.

Financially, HAIs represent an estimated annual impact of $6.7 billion to healthcare facilities, but the human cost is even higher.

Until recently, a lack of HAI reporting requirements for healthcare facilities has contributed to less-than-optimal emphasis being placed on eliminating the sources of healthcare associated infections. However, growing public anxiety regarding the issue and resulting legislation on state and local levels demanding accountability is serving to accelerate initiatives to combat HAIs.

To learn more about the impact of healthcare-associated infections for both medical professionals and patients, please visit www.haiwatch.com.

And do take a moment to read http://haiwatchnews.com

Thanks to Barbara Dunn for the above information.

Richard Nordquist, a guide at About.com, says, “When invited to submit expressions that ticked them off, readers responded enthusiastically–with clichés, usage errors, redundancies, misspellings, mispronunciations, and specimens of slang, jargon, and textspeak. Here (with readers’ comments in parentheses) are 200 pet peeves submitted by some very ticked-off defenders of the English language.”

We need to keep our sense of humor intact during these often-challenging times.

Well worth your time.

Thanks to Professor Harold V. Cordry for this entertaining and timely activity. And did I say hilarious?

Word “czars” at Lake Superior State University “unfriended” 15 words and phrases and declared them “shovel-ready” for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

“The list this year is a ‘teachable moment’ conducted free of ‘tweets,’” said a Word Banishment spokesman who was “chillaxin’” for the holidays. “‘In these economic times’, purging our language of ‘toxic assets’ is a ’stimulus’ effort that’s ‘too big to fail.’”

Former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and friends created “word banishment” in 1975 at a New Year’s Eve party and released the first list on New Year’s Day. Since then, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which includes words and phrases from marketing, media, education, technology and more.

And you, the reader, can contribute to the list…

This article first appeared in Valley View Health Center’s “All in a Day’s Work.” Valley View is a nonprofit located in Chehalis, Washington, with additional clinics in Centralia, Morton, Onalaska, Winlock, and Toledo. The photo below shows the Chehalis staff in December 2009.

Guest Post by Janna, and employee of Valley View Health Center of Lewis County, December 23, 2009: I love Christmas and how it makes me feel. I love it when I see or hear wonderful caring stories about my coworkers or just kind acts of people in general. This is the season for sharing so I would like to share some wonderful acts of caring and kindness and the difference that we make in people’s lives not only every day but at this special time of the year.

While talking with a patient the Medical Assistant found out that her husband had just left her and their four children. She was so worried about what she was going to do for Christmas for her children. Without saying a word to anyone, the MA with the help of her family and another coworker was able to collect some presents and some cash for this family. When the patient came in for a follow-up she was given the gifts and couldn’t believe that her children would have a Christmas. These employees did this for no other reason than that they cared and made a difference in this family’s life.

Another employee knows that one of her patients doesn’t have a lot of money and doesn’t eat well, so she purchased him a Holiday Family Meal gift card so she will be sure he has a nice holiday dinner.

An elderly lady thought she was having a heart attack and this was as far as she could drive. She walked thru the door and we immediately had an MA come out. This coworker sat and held this patient’s hand, listening, caring, and smiling as the woman spoke until the ambulance arrived.

I have seen co-workers rush to their purses to get cab money so a husband whose wife was being transported to the hospital could be there when his wife arrived (they came by Para transit). Enough money was gathered so he could have a bite to eat while he endured the long wait in the emergency room. The husband shed tears because of the generosity of everyone.

I know that there are many more stories out there. I know that every day, everyone at VVHC shows compassion, caring, and respect to all we come in contact with. I’m proud to be a part of this team. Merry Christmas to everyone and thank you, Santa’s little helpers.

Valley View Health Center provides medical, dental, and behavioral health services to Lewis County residents, primarily to the uninsured and under-insured, with payments based on a sliding fee scale.