Monthly Events on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

We have a one-day per month chronic disease management nurse who works out of Creston, comes down to Boswell Memorial Hall once a month and we run what’s called our Focus On Health series which we’ve been doing now for, we’re starting our fifth year and it’s a relatively successful initiative which draws in up to 20 community members per month and we have a community soup making, shared lunch and then a workshop focused on some aspect of chronic disease management. It’s a lot of fun and we have been learning a lot and she’s a fabulous young nurse who says it’s her favorite day of the month. So, we like to keep it that way and that initiative has now spread to [Person X] starting the same focus on health series in Crawford Bay so a community that is like 30 kms north has a different demographic but we also have a wonderful resource in our community paramedic [Person Y]. She’s partnering with the group in Crawford Bay and we will be starting the second year of a Focus on Health series in Crawford Bay. And the interesting thing is that that whole initiative has been picked up by other rural communities. Invermere is now looking at starting this, we’ve had people from Salmo asking how can we do this and even our young chronic disease management nurse is using the model to do a similar kind of monthly workshop, soup making series in Creston in the soup kitchen. So, I mean it is a model that is an example of how it works, but it has nothing to do with acute care health. This has got to do with disease prevention and health promotion. It’s great, it works very much for our kind of community.