Poster Board Number: 126
Title: Building Relationships through Monthly Health and Wellness Presentations and Events
Objective: To collaborate with the health system to conduct monthly health and wellness presentations for patients and their families, hospital staff, and the community. This poster will demonstrate the process of developing a series of health and wellness presentations in a patient library.
Methods: We began by identifying possible health-related topics by consulting the health observances calendar and creating a list of topics. The center partnered with the hospital’s speaker’s bureau to more easily facilitate finding speakers for each event topic. The role of the speaker’s bureau is to identify appropriate speakers, provide speaker gifts, and provide boxed lunches for participants. The center’s role is to coordinate the presentation logistics, including providing space, setup, and prizes for attendees and preparing a health display, handouts, and advertisement. For each event, a student intern creates a health display and poster, and staff use a variety of methods to promote the event throughout the hospital.
Results: The center has successfully held 9 health and wellness presentations. Twenty-one people attended the heart program; 23 attended the healthy kidneys presentation, and more than 70 attended a healthy kidneys open house. Other programs include: journaling for stress reduction, stop smoking, domestic violence awareness, injury prevention, healthy eating, and caregiving. Attendance is divided among hospital employees, patients and family members, students, and community members. Out of 76 evaluation forms returned, 6 attendees rate the program a 3, and the rest rate the program either 4 or 5 (1 worst, 5 best). All are likely or very likely to attend another program.
Conclusions: The monthly health programs allow the center to not only collaborate with the hospital’s speaker’s bureau and the health system’s clinical staff to plan these events, but provide a mechanism for engaging hospital employees, patients, students, and the community around a common health topic.
Authors: Dana L. Ladd, AHIP, Community Health Education Center Librarian; Sarah Amick, Research and Education Assistant; Community Health Education Center, Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
