This week on the Elevate & Relate podcast we sit down with longtime ACH friend and legend Bob Ditter to talk about Positive Childhood Experiences, or PCEs, and how positive camp experiences can build them. We walk you through the research that started it all, from the 1998 CDC and Kaiser Permanente study to the Johns Hopkins work on the seven PCEs that protect kids’ long-term health.

This week we’re sharing a collection of practical resources to support you this summer, from communicable disease management and tick prevention to allergy protocols and mandated reporting. Elevating care is a team effort, and having the right tools close at hand is is helpful, like cargo shorts or a utility belt.

As warmer weather returns each Spring and we prepare for the start of the summer camp season, tick activity rises sharply across the U.S. and stays high well into the back-to-school months. These are the same wooded, grassy, and brushy spaces where campers, staff, and families spend much of their time, which means ticks often show up as unwelcome visitors. Because ticks can spread illnesses like Lyme Disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, ehrlichiosis, and Alpha-Gal syndrome, early awareness and prevention are essential for anyone enjoying time outdoors

Summer camp and other youth-serving programs are developmentally rich environments that provide ample opportunities for fostering the mental, emotional, and social health (MESH) of young people. However, while the camp environment can provide positive growth experiences, it may also present new MESH challenges for both those with pre-existing MESH concerns and those without. Anyone who works with youth knows: it’s not easy being a kid.

Welcome to a special edition of our Elevate and Relate podcast. As we head into the summer of 2026, camp leaders, healthcare providers, and behavioral health specialists are facing an evolving ecosystem of challenges. The questions are piling up in our inboxes: How do we handle shifting respiratory illness trends? What is the right way to approach vaccine policies? How can we make sure our medication management protocols are legally sound?

Let’s be clear, head lice show up at camp every summer. Lice spreads through head-to-head contact, which happens constantly when kids play, bunk together, and share gear. Knowing how to identify, treat, and prevent lice elevates care, keeps your program running, and your campers way less itchy.

The modern gold standard for recovery is a gradual, stepwise progression. Here is how to navigate the journey from the initial injury to the final whistle.

A concussion is more than just a “bump on the head”—it is a functional brain injury that requires a systematic, evidence-based approach to ensure a safe return to life and sport. Moving too quickly increases the risk of Second-Impact Syndrome (a rare but potentially fatal swelling of the brain) or prolonged Post-Concussion Syndrome.

The modern gold standard for recovery is a gradual, stepwise progression. Here is how to navigate the journey from the initial injury to the final whistle.

Summer 2025 left marks. On campers, on staff, on the communities camps serve. Many of the leaders in the room have guided their people through flood, loss, grief, regulation change, carrying the weight of others while their own resilience has been stretched thin by the unrelenting pressure to adapt, respond, and keep showing up amid the hypervigilance.
CampWell + was not designed to minimize that. It was designed to meet each individual where they are at and equip them for what comes next.

A big thank you to our friends at CampDoc for hosting ACH CEO Dr. Tracey Gaslin and for generously sharing this recording with our community. We’re grateful for their partnership and for giving us the chance to bring this conversation to you.
In this session, Tracey walked through practical ways your organization can manage, protect, and communicate sensitive health information, from staff training to risk mitigation. Whether you’re onboarding new medical staff or building processes from the ground up, the goal is the same: elevating care and building trust with the families and participants you serve.

The greatest risk to any camp’s emergency preparedness may be believing it is already sufficient. Emergencies rarely follow the scenarios we rehearse, in fact they expose assumptions, ambiguities, and gaps that remain invisible during calm conditions. Most programs lack a way to assess their readiness relative to the broader field, and that’s exactly the problem our 2026 Emergency Preparedness research is designed to address.

This week, we’re exploring a foundational concept for elevating care. What is well-being? Well-being is more than feeling good on any one given day. It describes optimal psychological functioning and experience, a state that reaches beyond the absence of illness into something active and measurable. For our work in camps, in youth development, and community centered programs, this distinction matters.

This week, we’re exploring a foundational concept for elevating care. What is well-being? Well-being is more than feeling good on any one given day. It describes optimal psychological functioning and experience, a state that reaches beyond the absence of illness into something active and measurable. For our work in camps, in youth development, and community centered programs, this distinction matters.

A concussion is a form of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head (or body) that causes the head and brain to move rapidly. Loss of consciousness is not required. At camp, mechanisms commonly include field sports, waterfront slips, falls from height (ropes course, cabins), and collisions during any type of play.
At camp, the reality is that symptoms don’t always appear immediately. Some evolve over hours, so monitoring and clear handoffs (from the health center to counselors/parents) matter

Vaccination policy is set at the state level, and this spring more than 200 state level bills are actively reshaping what state policies look like. We know that what’s required at your camp this summer may be actively changing. Here’s what you need to know today.

This distinction matters, and new research published in Behavioral Sciences this February is helping us articulate why. Each summer, around 26 million young people attend summer camp programs across the United States. Many of them will hike, climb, paddle, and navigate a ropes course. Some will sleep under stars for the first time. And across all of it, something is happening beneath the surface of the fun that our community has long understood but hasn’t always been able to name with precision. A systematic review by Daniela Berry, Alexandra Skrocki, Emily Howell, and Daniel Pilgreen, published just this February, is helping us close that gap.

The magic of summer camp has always been found in the intentional spaces we create for youth to grow, connect, and thrive. As we look toward the future of camp medicine and behavioral health, some are proposing that a new tool would contribute to our “gear shed” with the potential to transform how we care for our communities: Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI might feel like something out of StarTrek, in some hospitals and healthcare networks it is already quietly supporting healthcare efficiency, from automating clinical notes to predicting disease outbreaks.
In our mission to elevate care, we recognize that technology may be its most powerful when it serves the human connection.

Participating in the Fight the Bite initiative is more than a seasonal safety effort. It is a meaningful act of emergency preparedness in action. As the Alliance for Camp Health (ACH) expands its Fight the Bite U.S. Tick-Borne and Lyme Disease Initiative nationwide in 2026, camps are engaging in the very practices that define readiness. Through planning, training, and coordinating with experts, our community is building a vibrant culture of prevention. With generous support from SC Johnson, this initiative strengthens prevention efforts at a time when tick-borne illnesses are increasing across the country.

Winter and spring health form review is where safe summers begin.
Camps that manage severe food allergies well do not exclusively rely on “good communication.” They build a repeatable system that moves the right information to the right people, trains operational staff to act fast, and protects a camper’s full participation in a camp ecosystem of care