Healthy Women, Healthy Lives---The Experience

   With Cincinnati as my hometown, I thought I knew everything there ever was to know about this city. I was wrong. Working for the Healthy Women, Healthy Lives Program, I discovered much more about the city of Cincinnati and now have a greater understanding of public and community health. For this capstone, Deena and I would travel to community centers, such as clothing and food pantries and community health clinics, and go door-to-door in impoversihed neighborhoods to spread the word about upcoming women's health screenings for Healthy Women, Healthy Lives (HWHL). Working within the community, we learned about our patient population. In the hospital setting, we often only think about treating the patient's diagnosis, rather than seeing how social or environmental factors within a patient's community might affect their health. By listening and interacting with local residents, we learned how factors within one's neighborhood can be detrimental for the members of a particular community. Thus, it is important to look beyond the diagnosis and instead treat the patient as a whole.
   For our capstone project, Deena and I chose to put together a de-stress program, "De-stress Express", which we held at a local church in the Madisonville community of Cincinnati. We had about 19 women attend the program. Our main objectives were to educate and teach the women about stress, how stress negatively affects one's health, and how stress and menopause are interrelated. During this program, we offered and demonstrated two ways for women to cope with their day-to-day stress--yoga and guided imagery. We experienced great success and saw a reduction in the women's stress levels and an increase in their knowledge about stress & health, menopause & stress, and ways to cope with stress. Due to the success of our program, HWHL plans to offer a free yoga class at the church to improve the mental, physiological, and emotional health of local women!