How do you raise health awareness?

[JamesMorgan]

hi all,

hope you all have enjoyed the bank holiday as its miserable weather in wales!

i am looking into different ways to raise health awareness in the surgery or on the ward and i was wondering if anyone has any good ideas or any hints and tips.

i work in a doctor's surgery in wales so we raise awareness by having leaflet dispensers in the reception area and in the nurse's rooms. there are large notice boards throughout the reception area which have different awareness campaigns. one of the boards is located near the midwives room so it has general women's health including smoking in pregnancy, child health. the other two boards change on a monthly basis as it reflects what's "hot" in the news or what's coming up on the uk health awareness calendar.

i am looking at getting a tv so we can stream messages into the reception area such as clinic times, health messages etc.

we do a lot of health promotion but i feel we could be doing more as we are not improving our numbers for patients who have had a smear.

any ideas?

[XB9S, BSN, MSN, EdD, RN, APN]

Hi James, health awareness and health promotion is a huge undertaking and I think that we need to be incorporating it as part of our wholistic approach to dealing with our patients. When I see a patient I will take a full history and include in there diet, smoking, alcohol, BMI and with each of these I have contacts and links to agencies that can offer advice and support along with information leaflets. I work in a surgical unit so this would happen pre-operatively. SO for example, I see a patient who is going to be having a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. She is overweight and smokes. As part of my assessment and treatment plan I will include smoking cessation advice and a referal to a dietician, I will back this up with information leaflets.

I like the idea of televisions streaming health informatoin into waiting rooms, we have diet and smoking cessation advice in our waiting rooms but have found that these are rarely taken which is why it is included into the consultation.

[JamesMorgan]

Hi Sharrie,

I definately agree that the health promotion is on a wider scale which includes it being part of the consultation but I find it very interesting that smoking and weight management information is not being picked up by your patients yet in my surgery it is one of the main areas of interest for our patients where we have now put on a weight clinic to handle to requests for more information.

By organising the health promotion litereature in the nurses rooms by installing leaflet dispensors they have found that it is easier and more manageable as they dont have to scramble for leaflets as they are all easily accesible and patients even ask for leaflets that were not discussed as they can see them on the wall.

I have found that health promotion is a time consuming task and has to be individually tailored to each patient which is why some might see it as a tick box exercise as they know full well the patient is not going to listen but people change and hopefully the information they are given will actually get through to them.

There are various companies who can provide Health Promotion computer systems which help you stream information into the waiting room and they include, Jayex (expensive but the best), AMSCREEN (free, easy to setup just plug it into a power socket, but paid for by advertising), FrontDesk systems. If you have an IT department and im sure you do they could just purchase a flat screen, bracket and hook it up to an old PC which just plays a power point slide show with the different messages on.