It seems easy to get lost in the day to day details of building healthier communities. Getting patients to eat healthier, get more exercise and regularly take their medications can take up all of our attention. If we pause to look at bigger picture issues, it is likely to be about getting funding for badly needed new facilities and overseeing the construction of such facilities. Yet there are other, underlying issues that need to be addressed. Can we get patients…
Few things can start the day, or the week off worse than a required routine monotonous morning meeting. Maybe you’ve been to meetings like this yourself and you know how they go. People drone on and on about things that no one else is really interested in. It is just that there is an expectation that everyone will say something when no one wants to, or even prepares to speak. Such meetings have been the bane of many of my…
What is the role of social factors, such as income, work environment, social cohesion, food, and transportation systems, in determining the health risks of individuals? This is a question asked in the Wesleyan University course catalog for Sociology 315 – The Health of Communities and today I received some information to help me find an answer to this. It started off with a series of emails sent from an iPhone containing clips of the Project Summaries presentation for this year’s…
On this week’s, Conversations on Health Care, Mark and Margaret speak with Dr. Alan Fleischman, medical director of the March of Dimes Foundation, about improving maternal-child health, reducing premature births and eliminating disparities in birth outcomes. The Community Health Center has had a long relationship with the March of Dimes, especially with our efforts to bring CenteringPregnancy care to our patients. Yet our commitment to the March of Dimes goes much deeper. On Sunday May 1, from 9 a.m. to…
In a few weeks, children, perhaps with the help of their fathers will make breakfast in bed for their mothers. They will bring them cards of appreciation; perhaps even flowers, chocolates or other gifts. Mothers will be brought out to lunches or dinners all as part of the annual celebration of Mother’s Day. This recognition won’t be for some extraordinary event. Instead it will be recognition for doing the daily tasks of motherhood, whether it be preparing meals, cleaning dishes…
One day when my youngest daughter was in Kindergarten, she came home and told my wife that her yoga teacher said that someone had complained about yoga and the students would no longer be allowed to say Namaste at the end of class. Namaste is a common Hindi salutation which is sometimes translated, “The spirit in me respects the spirit in you”. Personally, I think there is great value in teaching children to show respect to those around them. However,…