TriHealth Healthy Women Healthy Lives Program

  For my capstone experience, I was placed in Cincinnati to work with Good Samaritan's TriHealth Healthy Women, Healthy Lives Program (HWHL). HWHL's main focus is to provide impoverished women from Cincinnati and suburbs just outside Cincinnati with free health screenings and mammograms. The health screenings provided include testing for heart health (such as cholesterol, LDL, HDL, triglycerides, and glucose) as well as bone health (osteoporosis). As interns for this program, we worked on scheduling women for mammograms, working in the community to promote upcoming screenings, and working at the nurse review, self breast exam, and osteoporosis heel scan tables at health screening events.
  In addition to preparing and working health screenings, Deena and I have been working on community health newsletters and health handouts to be given out at health screenings. We have been challenged to write for a population with a 6-8th grade educational background which can be a difficult task when we are more familiar with a more advanced vocabulary that we are required to use for papers and other assignments in classes at Case. We have also had to learn to use less of the medical jargon and complex words that we use when speaking to medical staff and instead speak with appropriate, easy to understand words that patients at health screenings can better understand. For example, "palpate" may need to changed to feel or touch when demonstrating a self breast exam so that the patients are able to understand what you are asking of them. This experience will prove to be helpful in our future when we do patient-teaching or prepare public health care events.