Kuakini Medical Center - Kuakini Healthful Lifestyle Promotions

What is it?

Kuakini Health System’s Healthful Lifestyle Promotions activities help increase community awareness about personal health and reinforce the importance of practicing and maintaining good health habits. Education and awareness activities include free health screenings, clinical consultations at community events, interactive learning activities and demonstrations, and distribution of health-related brochures, posters and recipes. Free screenings include glucose-cholesterol screenings, blood pressure checks and computerized breast cancer risk assessments. The program includes proper hand-washing activities, a wide variety of health informational brochures and unique posters on a variety of topics. The brochures and posters are researched, written, designed and printed by Kuakini health care team members.

Who is it for?

Children, adults, the elderly and women.

Why do they do it?

The goal is to educate and raise awareness in people of all ages about their personal health and encourage them to live and maintain a healthful lifestyle. Healthful Lifestyle Promotions objectives include:

• Provide information and resources about various health-related issues.
• Promote good health habits and develop community interest in health-related issues.
• Help the community assess their personal health status through free health screenings.
• Increase awareness about an individual’s health status.
• Encourage community members to take an active role in maintaining their health.
• Encourage individuals to incorporate self-exams into their lifestyles and use screening results to improve personal health habits.
• Foster positive attitudes and behaviors about healthful lifestyles.

Impact

Each year, more than 3,000 individuals have benefit from the year-round program. Participants are always grateful for free health screenings and the opportunity to talk with nurses, physicians, pharmacists, dietitians, respiratory therapists and other allied health professionals during community events. Kuakini’s staff has often recommended follow-up appointments with physicians or other specialists when participants did not know they were at risk for a serious condition or that they could benefit from certain treatments and medications. Feedback has helped program leaders focus education and awareness activities on health issues that affect their target audiences as well as health topics of most interest to them.

Contact: Donda D. Spiker, APR
Manager, Marketing and Public Relations
Telephone: 808-547-9168
E-mail: d.spiker@kuakini.org