This Saturday is the deadline for nominations for the Community Hero Award for Iowans who have gone above and beyond to strengthen families while preventing child abuse. Deb Cox, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, says up to ten people will be singled out for the awards statewide. Cox says, “The purpose of this award is to really recognize the people who are working at the local, community level on a daily basis, working to change and improve the lives of our children and families.”

The winners will be recognized during the annual Child Abuse Prevention and Family Support Conference which is scheduled for early May at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines. “The conference has had sell-out registration the past three years and we expect that again this year,” Cox says. “We take up to 600 registrants for the conference. It’s three days of training and networking and skill building.”

This Saturday, April 1st, marks the start of Child Abuse Prevention Month in Iowa, with a goal of informing the public about the problem. “Child abuse is an ongoing problem and it has been for eons,” Fox says. “The work of prevention is to build the strength at the local community level, to be able to recognize the signs and symptoms of families at risk and then support those families so abuse doesn’t occur in the first place.” C

Cox says statistics on child abuse in Iowa for 2016 will be released in a few weeks. In recent years, she says cases of physical and sexual abuse have remained steady statewide while neglect cases have risen. Learn more and find nomination forms for the Community Hero Award at: www.pcaiowa.org

A report issued this week claims Iowa is the best state in the country to be a doctor. Analysts with the personal-finance website WalletHub say they examined data that included average annual salaries of physicians and hospitals per capita. Scott McIntyre, spokesperson for the Iowa Hospital Association, says he’s not surprised Iowa topped the list. “Speaking from the hospital perspective, I think our hospitals provide doctors with a great place to work,” McIntyre said. “A place where they are respected, where they have opportunities for leadership, and where health care is done in a patient-first environment.”

Iowa has 118 hospitals. The WalletHub report claims physicians in this state are paid the fourth highest average wage, when adjusted for the cost of living. “The competition for physicians is stiff throughout the nation and throughout the world,” McIntyre said. “It’s a very tough market out there, so Iowa…has its work cut out for it to attract the best physicians possible.”

The report also notes Iowa has the sixth most hospitals per capita and the sixth highest insured population rate.

(Radio Iowa)

No injuries were reported, but about $500 in property damage occurred Wednesday evening in Creston, when an axle broke on a 1989 Chevy S-10 pickup. About two-feet of the axle with a bolted on tire rolled about past the pickup and down the street, before striking a 2003 Chevy Blazer that was legally parked in a driveway.

Creston Police say the driver of the pickup, 26-year old Matthew Deane Thompson, of Creston, was traveling south on New York Avenue when the incident happened just before 7-p.m., Wednesday. Thompson’s truck sustained about $700 worth of damage.

No citations were issued.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – The world’s oldest and most experienced spacewoman has just set another record, this time for spacewalking. NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson floated out on the eighth spacewalk of her career Thursday morning, 250 miles up at the International Space Station. That’s the most spacewalks ever performed by a woman. Whitson is a southwest Iowa native. She hails from Beaconsfield, in Ringgold County.

Whitson and her spacewalking partner, Shane Kimbrough, need to complete prep work on a docking port. Kimbrough disconnected the port during a spacewalk last Friday. Flight controllers in Houston moved it to a new location Sunday. It will serve as a parking spot for future commercial crew capsules.

Midway through Thursday’s spacewalk, Whitson will surpass the current record for women of 50 hours and 40 minutes of total accumulated spacewalking time.

The 57-year-old Whitson has been in orbit since November.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Polk County Jail inmates are exploring the internet, watching movies and contacting loved ones through a pilot project that gives them access to tablet computers. The Des Moines Register reports that Telmate, a Fruitland, Idaho-based company, is providing 97 tablets free to the jail. The company owns them and collects from three to five cents a minute directly from the inmates’ jail commissary accounts.

The inmates have spent about 30,000 minutes a day since the tablets were distributed to jail cellblocks March 9. The company says studies show the more inmates stay connected, the less likely they are to reoffend. The assistant jail administrator, Cory Williams, says the inmates must follow jail rules if they want to maintain access to the tablets.