State Epidemiology Workgroup

Florida’s SEW was established in June 2005 with funding from a federal Strategic Prevention Framework – State Incentive Grant (SPF-SIG).  This grant was awarded to the state in October 2004 by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).  The SPF-SIG grant is administered by the state’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) and SEW staffing is under a contract from DCF to the Comprehensive Drug Research Center at the University of Miami.  The SEW, which meets face-to-face on a semi-annual basis, is composed of members with expertise in epidemiologic data and/or drug policy drawn from a wide variety of state agencies, universities, and community-based organizations.  SEW members are consulted by the SEW staff individually or in groups throughout the year as issues arise that are related to their special expertise.  A list of current SEW members and their affiliations will soon be available on this website.  

In this website we present data that prevention providers, coalitions, and other stakeholders can use to design, and monitor their programs.  The goal is to provide data that are (1) based upon procedures and processes designed to gather a representative sample or that rely on standardized reporting methods, (2) relatively current, (3) possible to be updated and (4) provided in a manner that allows standardized comparisons across sub-state geographic areas that include counties or collections of counties.  The SEW staff recommended against including data that are old and/or that cannot be updated in the future (e.g., 1997 data on drug exposed newborns), measures that rely on data available only in limited locales (e.g., local survey data) or measures that may be considered an artifact of reporting procedures that vary among regions of the state or that are the product of differing policies and procedures in different geographic locales (e.g., data on drug arrests, drug seizures, etc.)