 We're back, we're live. Welcome back to Think Tech. Here we're on Likeable Science on a Friday at 2 p.m. That's what we do at 2 p.m. on Friday. And we have Ethan Allen, who is our host on Likeable Science. And he is in Aloha Tower, two blocks away. But he is there with the Hawaii Public Health Association at the 2016 Hawaii Public Health Conference. And in fact, he has guests and people that he is going to interview. So welcome to your own show, Ethan. Thank you, Jay. It's good to be here. You take it from here, Ethan. Yes, and with me I have Dr. Christian Gloria. Welcome, Christian. Thank you, Ethan. Thank you, Jay. Thank you for the invitation. I'm happy to be here. Christian is a person largely responsible for getting this conference together. And it's been a remarkable event. We're in day three of a three-day conference. We're winding it on down. We've had hundreds of people here, public health workers, doctors, nurses. Nurses, educators, policymakers, stakeholders, pretty much really everybody in the community who's interested and involved in public health. And the big theme this conference is health is everyone's kuleana, right? Everyone's responsibility. Right. And so the theme this year is health is everyone's kuleana, building community momentum to promote action. And so we are trying to push for the concept that we do a lot of talking, but it's about time that we start really working together and actually making change. Yeah, and this gets to this idea of collective impact. Some of the public health challenges are these very large, so-called wicked problems, right? And no one agency or one group can solve them. They have many, the roots lie in many places. Social status, economic factors, environmental factors, civil factors, policies. So it takes a lot of different groups working together to address them effectively. Right, exactly. And so as I have conversations with many different public health professionals, whether they're doctors, nurses, educators, policymakers, non-profit organization managers, what we realize is we do a lot of great things on our own, but without that collective effort, it's really not taking us where we need to be. And so we continue to face and see the same problems that we've faced for many, many years. And we're making effort, but not fast enough because the problems are only getting worse. And so hopefully as we join forces together and come together in conferences, like these, not these conversations, I will be able to find ways to actually collaborate and cooperate. Exactly, it's sort of this race between these escalating problems and our advancing abilities and willingness to collaborate for another, which is gonna win, right? Exactly. While you're working on some of these high-profile items, for example, the Genki Sushi disease, Zika, what about SARS? Is there any action on SARS? And what about mental health in Hawaii? There's all kinds of talk about that. Is that within public health? Yes, actually, I'm glad you asked that question because the repeating theme that we've heard through all of our speakers locally, statewide or nationally, it's all about the fact that everything is public health, even if you are in the Department of Transportation, that is public health, even if you're in business and finance, that is public health, because at the end of the day, it impacts all of our well-being and the stressfulness, like you said, that could impact our mental health as well as our physical health. Are you tackling some of these headline stories like Zika? So we did talk about, we had some sessions on Zika, as well as some of the other epidemics that we're facing today. I don't remember seeing a session on SARS. It seems that HEPA, and there's a session right now actually that's going on discussing efforts on HEPA and prevention in Hawaii. So it did take, for example, a whole community to figure out where the infection was coming from. And so that's why it took us a long time having to work from different sectors within the community to figure out, for example, like you said, that it may have come from Genki Sushi among other places. And ultimately they found out that it might have come sourced from the Philippines. It took a long time because it involved a lot of people to find out where these epidemics might be starting. Right, this is very, a lot of public health is not sort of simple diagnosis of a disease and treat the disease. It's looking at, in many cases, the social determinants of health in large scale. Right, exactly. Well, often it's a matter of health infrastructure. I mean, for example, a laboratory, a biosafety laboratory. Say a class three biosafety laboratory, such as had been contemplated in Kakaakoa, and I think it was also contemplated in Waimanu Home Road. And the question is, is this being discussed? How important is infrastructure like that regional biosafety laboratory for public health in Hawaii? Oh, yes, tough questions. Sorry. It's not as my area of expertise, but I do know that, for example, that there are some construction happening in downtown for such things as those laboratories that you're mentioning. Given our location, given our very small size in terms of our land and the fact that our land's always moving, whether it's an earthquake, whether it's a tsunami or a hurricane, we do have to make sure that we talk about all the potential ways of keeping our infrastructure safe, right? And so with all the constructions happening that I know about, for example, at Port Street Mall in downtown, so that is one of those things that everybody's asking questions about. So we're being very careful and making sure that our infrastructure is very safe one way or another. Infrastructure affects public health and other ways too, that is the whole infrastructure of neighborhoods impacts the health of the residents there, are the neighborhoods that are friendly, encourage people to get out and walk, people get more exercise, that encourage people to interact, people get more socializing. All of these things are important people's well-being on various levels. So yeah, this is what Executive Christian was saying earlier, this isn't just about health professionals, it involves everyone. Yeah, it's really about building that community that promotes health naturally, right? And so just like what Ethan said, I'm actually very passionate about the built environment. And I know we've had some effort here in Hawaii, for example, building more sidewalks and bike lanes so that we could promote using of bikes and walking with each other and making sure that our communities and sidewalks are safe enough that people will actually use it. I do think we have still a long way to go. I've been in different communities in the mainland, particularly in Austin, Texas, where I had gone to school for 15 years, where we were quite progressive in making sure that we had very bike-friendly, pedestrian-friendly lanes and that we had safe communities so that people actually use them and go to parks where they can be more physically active. You know, one of the big concerns, I think, that I would have about public health is whether our public health organizations, such as they are, and however they are coordinated among all of them, are adequately prepared for extreme storms, because one of the things that happens as a result of an extreme storm, of course, as the public health is affected, sometimes dramatically, you've seen that in so many places, most recently, I think, in the Philippines. And I wonder where we are on that and wonder whether your conference here at Aloha Tower is covering that. You know, I'll be honest with you, I wish we had more discussion on that and only in the conference, but really all throughout the state or really all of our neighbor island friends throughout the Pacific, especially myself who was born and raised in the Philippines. So I'm very familiar with those kinds of problems. I'm actually quite vocal about having that conversation even very locally, like, for example, at the university level. I often question, especially with the new development and the new opening of Aloha Tower being now a Hawaii Pacific University facility, that is one of the first questions I asked when they were still showing us the master plan. What is the evacuation plan? What is the emergency response in case something happens? And it's funny, you mentioned that I had, was actually talking to the event coordinator here at 8 a.m. just yesterday. And sort of kind of ingest the sort of how I approach these things lately. I asked her, so now that we have a conference here, we've got at least 250 people attending this facility, which is beautifully at the waterfront. What is the evacuation plan? Is that part of our obligation as the host of this organization to talk about what the evacuation plan is to start. And the response to me was that, well, they have an obligation to the students, the residents who live upstairs, but because we are just sort of a transient group, that they're not necessarily obligated by law or any kind of policy for us to have an emergency plan for a conference. Wow, wow, wow. And so it makes me nervous. And so it's not, unfortunately, it's not only an issue of concern for small gatherings like this. It's a concern for all of our islands. I was just at disaster preparedness training a couple of months ago, and they talked about how if we are faced with the extreme tsunami and the super tsunami that we are pretty much overdue for, we can expect all of our coasts to be at least 30 feet under water. And really, nobody wants to think about it. Nobody wants to talk about it. And we still continue to live in places that are very dangerous. But a lot of work still needs to be done. A lot of talking needs to be done. And I'll be honest, it makes me nervous. And I know I'm one of the few people when I move into an apartment, I make sure I'm away from the flood zones and I'm high up in the mountains so that I don't have to possibly deal with these kinds of problems. Yeah, but isn't that true that a storm and the water coming in on the land and affecting our systems, our plumbing, our water systems, our sewage systems and so forth has almost an immediate effect on public health. And it can be disastrous. It can wipe out populations. And I don't think people realize that. Right, because within the first three days, your drinking water system goes down in the first three days, people running out of water and they're starting to die. Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things that I actually learned in my training a few months ago for disaster response and preparedness, we have to make sure that we train our community members and find community leaders who could take the lead in case of an emergency and in case of situations where responders are unable to get into the communities, maybe because roads are destroyed or blocked. We'd have to train our community members and community leaders to make sure that they can self sustain themselves for at least a week, if not two weeks, because it could take that long for responders to get to those communities because our roads are so limited. And oftentimes we only have one in and out pathway from one neighborhood to another. Well, we're gonna take a break in a minute, but let me ask you one more question just in the interim, Christian. And that is, this is the first time a conference of this nature, magnitude and consequence is being held at Aloha Tower. I mean, we had the Hawaii annual code challenge in one of the multi-purpose rooms over the past month or so, but that was small compared to the conference you're involved now. How are the facilities? And this is a new deal here for Hawaii Pacific University. How is it working? You're just like Ethan's response. It's very well received, it's a beautiful facility. It's everything's brand new, renovated. We have great waterfront views. We have restaurants like Gordon Buresh. And we're also very much ingrained with the academic culture. So it's a great place for learning and for having conversations and creating networks. And it's also a great way to connect professionals with students because students are always wanting to have opportunities to be a participant in these conversations. And so it's been a great venue in that sense. We are nicely located downtown surrounded by all of many of the non-profit health organizations. And so it's been very convenient for everybody. So it's been great and I highly recommend the Aloha Tower Marketplace. All right, we may not be able to pry Ethan out of there, eh? No, it's great. Which has very different on beyond than a standard conference center. You know, where you're just in these big conference rooms all the time. Here, one routing outside and it's really very pleasant. That's great. A sign of things to come. More conferences there in the future. Okay, then with a short break, that's Christian Gloria, PhD from HPU, Public Health. And of course our host, Ethan Allen. We'll be right back. Aloha, my name is Josh Green. I serve as Senator from the Big Island on the Kona side. And I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on Think Tech is called Health Care in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us. Again, thanks for supporting Think Tech. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi and you can catch me on Mondays at 11 on Think Tech Hawaii. Stacy to the rescue. See you then. Aloha, it's summertime in Honolulu, Hawaii. My name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm your host for Shrink Wrap Hawaii. We're on every Tuesday at three o'clock and we talk about mental health and general health. Join us, thank you. Hello, my name is Crystal. Let me tell you my talk show, I'm all about health. It's healthy to talk about sex. It's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about. It's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it. So I welcome you to watch Quok Talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life. Join me. Aloha, my name is John Wahee and I actually had a small part to do with what's happening today. Served actually in public office. But if you don't already know that here's a chance to learn more about what's happening in our state by joining me for a talk story with John Wahee every other Monday. Thank you and I look forward to your seeing us in the future. One, we're back, we're live. We're here again, Think Tech Hawaii, likeable science on a given Friday at 2 p.m. With our host, Ethan Allen who is doing on location here at Aloha Tower. With the Hawaii Public Health Association in the 2016 Hawaii Public Health Association conference. And his guest now, he's a second guest, is Tom Quay. So welcome to the show, Tom. Well, thank you very much. It's good to be here. Ethan, why don't you reveal what Tom does and why he's there? Tom generously came out to talk with us. He is the president-elect of the American Public Health Association, the big national organization of which the Hawaii Public Health Association is just one, one fifth, one fifth. One of 54, 54 affiliates, yes. 54 members, right. So he runs the whole show basically and he's a longtime public health practitioner, if you like to say, from Marion County, Ohio, the health commissioner there has been actively involved in all kinds of health, public health approvals and let's say authorizations, but accreditation processes and it gave wonderful talks here, both at the meeting and now at the conference. Tom, it strikes me that with the speed at which medical research takes place and the speed for that matter at which epidemics take place, the whole field of public health has to become more and more global. And you've probably seen those trends, those seed changes in the past few years, you know, in your role with public health. Can you describe that to us? What is the global process? What do you see happening in the field of public health? Sure, well, global is a very good way to describe public health, not only in the most literal terms of international and global thinking, but in terms of systems, because public health, there truly isn't anything that's more than a degree or two separated from the actual specific field of public health, whether it's environmental or it's related to communicable disease or health policy or health care, any of those things, those are all part of the, under the big umbrella of public health. So whenever there's a conversation going on, whether it's a local conversation, that's just sort of a microcosm of something that's going on at the global level, or it's a global conversation about something, for example, like climate change, these are all public health issues. They all have trickle-down effects on individuals as in their health, but also populations and the health of a population in general. We're doing a much better job, I think, in public health of drawing attention to issues that are more emergent, things like Zika, things like climate change, things like, you know, any reemergence of what are vaccine-preventable diseases or superbugs, things that are becoming resistant to historical treatments. Those are all on our radar, and it's a big radar. Well, you know, I guess it was about a year ago that Hawaii had a huge conference about brain research. We had it in the Hawaii Convention Center, and there were a huge number of people from all over the world who were involved in brain research, and I walked up to the table with my cameraman, and there were three or four fellows sitting around the table, and I said, you know, can we get some comments from you? And they said, no, you can't. We're busy writing a paper right now at this table. We're collaborating. Watch us collaborate and leave us alone. And I took that, you know, as a good-natured remark, but the fact is, this is all about collaboration. Can you give us an example of how collaboration takes place at this conference now at Public Health? Sure, and so the first example that comes to mind is the collaboration between the academic institutions and the Public Health Association and the various entities that the Public Health Association represents, whether they're practitioners or they're policy folks. So at the systems level, there's tremendous collaboration between the association and the academic institutions. The academic institution here is really supporting the venue to allow this conference to happen. My participation with my role at the American Public Health Association and being an invited guest of the Hawaii Public Health Association gave me the opportunity then, yesterday and the day before, to meet with folks from the Hawaii Pacific and from the University of Hawaii. Thank you very much. It's been still dealing with jet lag with those academic institutions and speaking with the students and connecting them to the Hawaii Public Health Association. But then also just yesterday, I had lunch with the state health director in Hawaii to talk about the national accreditation of the state health department and had a very, very good conversation with her about the value of that. So those are all sorts of, at the systems level, it's not writing a paper on brain neuroscience or something, but this is really about systems collaborations, which is really a little bit more what we focus on in public health. It's the population level stuff. Sure, Ethan, can you get a handle from Tom on where we are in the continuum of this conference? How far into it are we? What are we doing right now? What programs are going right now? And what programs have yet to happen? Well, in terms of the conference, we're basically almost done with it. We're in, I think, the very last session or the next to the last session of three days of conferencing. It started with some sort of pre-conference activities on Wednesdays and rather extended dialogues. Where we looked at the same issues we had dealt with last year and saw what progress we made on the whole built environment issue, what progress we made on these fronts that we were tackling and we talked about last year. Then we had that Wednesday evening, we had the annual meeting of the HPHA, membership got to sort of here, an update on the years, activities and all got to meet Tom. And then we burst into a little conference all day yesterday and all day today, basically, many different panels on different topics, ranging, as Christian was saying, from A to Z, basically. And these conferences are wonderful. I've had an opportunity in a variety of roles with the American Public Health Association to participate in a number of different affiliates, so the state level conferences that are a little bit shorter than the national one, but it's really interesting to see the parallels that exist in the presentations, the issues that are being talked about, the dissemination of information, whether it's programming, best in emerging practices and programming, or it's advocacy, public health advocacy issues, or more scientific sorts of things, they really do parallel, it's nice to see that we're not as disjointed as we might be given the very broad diversity of the field of public health, that we really are, it's by accident, but we really are hanging out of the same playbook, so I'm glad to see that. Yeah, we have some nice pictures, we were showing some nice pictures while you were talking Tom about people getting together and it looks like a very happy and satisfied group of staffers and participants in the conference. But now that it's almost over, I wonder if I could ask you what you'd be taking back with you? What are the most memorable conferences or lessons or revelations that you have had or seen during this conference, aside from meeting Ethan Allen, and aside from being on SYNC Tech? Yeah, well, Ethan is one of a number of just wonderful folks that I've met here, again, both at the association, at the universities, and at the state health department. There's the public health stuff I'll take back, but this is Hawaii, I've never been to Hawaii. So a lot of the conversations I'll have with folks will probably start off talking about Hawaii, and then devolving, if you will, to public health and issues there. One of the things, one of the messages that we'll probably go back with is how the National Association and the local affiliate can support and sustain one another in terms of our dissemination of information, our public health advocacy work, and so forth. Hawaii is really leading, one of the things that I learned as a product of being here is why it truly is leading in some of the public health advocacy and policy work, whether it's with regards to the importance and the communication of the importance of the impact of climate on health, or whether it's what you're doing with tobacco and the agent folks are able to purchase tobacco or sugary drinks and things like this. You're setting an example that is so valuable for the rest of the country, and I will do my best to always give you credit for that. No, thank you for that, thank you for that. You know, you can do medical research online for sure, and you can study and see photographs and movies and charts and graphs of people doing medical research from public health research all over the world, but you know, it's different when you get to see them in the flesh, when you get to shake their hands, you get to meet, for example, the state health director of Virginia Pressler, because then there'll come a time, perhaps, when you need to talk to her, or she needs to talk to you, and when you make that call or send that email, it's different when you have physically met her, no? Well, and you've really described it just an absolutely critical point of public health, and that's the relationship building, and whether we're dealing with, in my case, in my day job, I mean, my involvement with APHA is voluntary, but my day job, I'm a health commissioner in Marion, Ohio, as Ethan was saying, and it's all about the relationships, whether it's relationships between the health officers and the health department and the community, because if we go in and we have the answer, it's the wrong answer. We need to get that answer out of the community, and that involves a relationship, or whether it's a relationship between the public health associations or between, again, my opportunity through my public health association to meet people like the state health director who under any other circumstances, the health commissioner in Marion County, Ohio, is not ever gonna meet the state health director of the state of Hawaii, and you're absolutely right. I can send out a group email to every state health director in the country, but I know that I can pick up a phone and call your state health director and say, hey, remember when we had lunch at the Tower Marketplace, you know? Great word and beer, you know, so it's a big deal. Well, Ethan, we're almost out of time. I'd like you to close. I'd like you to tell us how you really feel about Christian Gloria and how you really feel about Tom Quaid and otherwise wrap up our discussion today. Should I leave for that? I've been so, really, I've been totally amazed and pleased to be just a small part of this conference and have the honor of meeting Tom and the pleasure of seeing all of Christian's hard work as Christian was really the driving force to organize this conference. So it's been really wonderful to see this. See, it's all come together, see the different groups get together and talk and exchange ideas and hopefully some real good collaborations will grow out of it. So I think it's been a great win-win conference all around. Thank you very much for being here, Tom. Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Ethan. Aloha, you guys. Great conference.