“Our goal, really, is for all women in Texas to have access to the preventive care, including contraception, that they need. So I think this session really was very positive toward that.”
about the progress TMA made before the legislature adjourned in June be- cause “there was some great stuff that happened, but there was some other common-sense stuff that didn’t. And it’s frustrating that despite all of our efforts, sometimes you still can’t con- vince hearts and minds.”
SUCCESS ON EPIPEN, E-CIG FRONTS Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAl- len) authored a pair of TMA-backed measures that earned Gov. Greg Ab- bott’s signature and stood as two of TMA’s biggest public health victories of the 2015 session. Senate Bill 66 allows school dis-
tricts and open-enrollment charter schools to adopt policy on the use of epinephrine auto-injectors, known as EpiPens, and provides guidelines for districts to train school personnel on administering the injections. The bill allows physicians to give school districts standing orders to adminis- ter the injections to someone who ap- pears to be experiencing anaphylaxis. (See “Schoolhouse Stock,” November 2014 Texas Medicine, pages 53–56, or visit
www.texmed.org/Schoolhouse Stock.)
Louise Bethea, MD, an allergist and immunologist in the Spring-Wood- lands area and president-elect of the Texas Allergy, Asthma and Immunol- ogy Society, testified before both Sen- ate and House committees on SB 66. Dr. Bethea says the Texas Medical
Practice Act doesn’t clearly state that a physician can write a prescription for an entire school district. Texas schools have more than 160,000 allergic chil- dren, Dr. Bethea says, and a quarter of first-time anaphylactic reactions occur at school. But only between 25 percent and 28 percent of allergic children have access to an EpiPen at school. “We also wanted to make sure that
prescribing physicians, dispensing pharmacists, and those assisting and training or administering epineph- rine auto-injectors would be immune from legal liability. These protections are provided in SB 66,” Dr. Bethea said.
46 TEXAS MEDICINE August 2015
Senator Hinojosa also tackled the
growing popularity of electronic ciga- rettes, known as e-cigarettes, with Senate Bill 97, a bill TMA supported. SB 97 makes it a crime to sell e-cig- arettes to someone younger than 18 or to someone who intends to give e- cigarettes to a minor, just as it is illegal to do so with regular tobacco products. The new law also bans e-cigarettes from public school campuses and school events. Although the scientific community continues to develop its knowledge of e-cigarettes’ health implications, Dr. Van Ramshorst says there’s enough data to support restrictions on their usage. In April, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products published data showing that in a one-year span from 2013 to 2014, e-cigarette use tripled among middle school and high school students. “When you look at teenagers, it
seems that they’re less interested in traditional tobacco products, like tra- ditional cigarettes, because they un- derstand that they’re dangerous and that they cause lung cancer,” said Dr. Van Ramshorst, who testified on SB 97. “But their perception of electronic nic- otine delivery systems, e-cigarettes, is that they’re less dangerous and more cool — which makes e-cigs exquisitely challenging. And so I’m glad that we took some steps.”
BUDGET WINS Mental health funding for DSHS re- ceived significant boosts in the legis- lature’s 2016–17 budget. House Bill 1 allocated a total of $3.6 billion to men- tal health, an increase of $150 million over 2014–15 levels. The budget in- cluded nearly $6 million in additional funds for community mental health services, an increase of $20 million for state mental health hospitals, and more than $50 million extra for com- munity mental health hospitals, in- cluding additional funding to increase
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