Strategies

Provide free and confidential counseling and service referrals via telephone-based conversation, web-based chat, or text message to individuals in crisis, particularly those with severe mental health concerns

Implement systems that help health professionals support patient tobacco cessation, often with referrals, self-help pamphlets, and pharmacotherapy

Use broad media-based efforts to educate large groups of current and potential tobacco users about the dangers of tobacco use

Provide an 8 or 12 hour training to educate laypeople about how to assist individuals with mental health problems or at risk for problems such as depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders

Use regulation to extend nurse practitioners’ (NPs’) scope of practice to provide care to the full scope of their training and skills without physician oversight, especially for primary care

Improve work environments for nurses via establishment of strong nursing leadership, organizational support, etc.

Use pervious concrete, porous asphalt, permeable interlocking pavers, open-jointed blocks or cells, or other permeable pavement in individual or commercial development efforts; also called porous or pervious pavement

Establish programs that accept expired, unwanted, or unused medicines from designated users and dispose of them responsibly

Make clinician, hospital, clinic, long-term care facility, and insurance plan performance on health care quality measures publicly available via report cards, reporting websites, or similar tools

Establish bioretention systems (e.g., rain gardens, bioretention cells, green roofs, planter boxes, bioswales, etc.) to make city landscapes more permeable to help control stormwater