what about Mississippi’s health I think
you know this is our health statistics
for many many years and it’s a flatline
we’re either 49th or 50th and that’s a
real problem but there are other
problems that are associated with that
that make it even more dire and that is
if you look at the percentage of
Mississippians who now have diabetes
well over 30% and who are obese about
75% of our people are overweight and
obese and you do the projections for
those they’re pretty startling but the
bigger projection is the one on the
bottom there that is a disability rate
in the state and that is an old number
it’s now much higher but it’s not been
released and when you have a quarter or
a third of your population that is
disabled you can’t make your budget work
for the state so this is not only a
personal issue of health but it is a
future issue of the viability of the
state so a group of us at UMC who were
struggling with these issues after being
there for a number of years and seeing
no needle to move on anything asked what
could we do in order to do anything in
medicine especially in Mississippi you
really have to look at the social
determinants of health because that’s
where the rubber meets the road and of
the seven major social determinants of
health we looked at what educators and
clinicians could do and we picked out
four of them now before we could get
started on some kind of document to try
to get some grant
funding to do this because it’s all done
on nights and weekends and we have to
hire some help this happened and this
was another hit to our health system
because basically all healthcare from
the coast to Jackson and including
Jackson shut down after Katrina from
short periods here in Jackson about a
week to ten days
fortunately the University and several
of our hospitals had generators and fuel
but the coasts the doctors left and they
never came back so we were faced with a
situation where we had a significant
percentage of our population with no
health care so one of the things that
the university came up with was an idea
with Public Broadcasting was to put
someone on the on the radio who could
answer everyday health questions and we
ended up developing two of those people
and it was such a success and so highly
utilized that we put that into our
working plan that we were developing for
trying to address some of the issues
that I showed you earlier on so we
called this southern remedy radio
programming to have a catchy name and
our target audience was anyone with low
health literacy and one of the biggest
problems we’ve had is is that we are
missing our target audience using public
broadcasting and that was an issue from
the very beginning the people who were
calling in were the people who had just
gotten back from the Mayo Clinic for
their third consultation for hair loss
and that just didn’t compute to where we
wanted to go so we decided we’re going
to
man the radio show but we’re going to
try to make it more focus and hopefully
get it to podcasts and other social
media where it would be more widely
available and that we also should move
to television but most importantly we
should go we should get troops on the
ground that’s where the action was
troops on the ground so in 2016 we
expanded our radio a programming to 5
hours of live radio dr. talk shows a
week and doctors like me get hoarse
about every other week because we we
catch something from our patients so
that also helped us to substitute for
each other so that was a real backup but
perhaps more importantly was the troops
on the ground aspect and this is one of
the lesser-known efforts of southern
remedy but perhaps the most important
one and that is is that we train lay
individuals and certify them to take
blood pressure what measure blood
glucose measure BMI and do some basic
dietary counseling on-site in churches
and civic organizations and because we
were very fortunate and the medical
school was very unfortunate and not
having any nutrition in our curriculum
in the medical school we were able to
embed this into the curriculum of the
medical school and the nursing school
and now most of the other schools are
coming on board and teach this southern
remedy healthy living curriculum which
was developed with a number of folks
from our various disciplines who have
expertise in this area and now we are
training in every one of our medical
students and every one of our nursing
students most of our PT students and the
dental students and so forth in the
first
year when they’re anxious to get their
hands on patience but don’t have the
skills to do it we’re giving them a
skill set that they can go into
communities and help with screening
because 50% of diabetes and about 50% of
hypertension and Mississippi is
undetected and by the time we get the
patients we have end-stage disease and
that’s why dialysis units in Mississippi
are growing faster than dollar stores
they’re literally everywhere and they’re
just getting started and one of the
reasons we were able to do this is the
federally qualified health center
movement which started in Mississippi
came out of Freedom Summer and has been
perpetuated here and we have more of
these community health centers in rural
areas in our state per capita than any
other state and we also have them in in
urban areas and they charge people on a
sliding scale so really there’s nobody
in Mississippi that doesn’t have access
to health care they just don’t know they
have it so we have incorporated
connecting our individuals to those
community health centers which by the
way the president administration has not
funded as of this hour and the funding
for which will go zero by the first of
the week if it doesn’t get funded but
we’re hopeful that that that will occur
so we can offer people health care even
if that they have no resources we’ve now
done a number of health documentaries
and the real value in these we think is
not the television run times that we get
but they are all put on our website put
into blog sites put into social media
and you may though that our
chicken nugget one actually has broken
national records for replay so you know
that’s where people’s interest is it
will go there we we have now trained
1500 community health advocates and our
tooling up to train a lot more if you’re
interested we want to work with you give
me a call we can send you a medical
student to set up a screening work with
your people to train folks whatever you
need that’s what we want to do and we
also have picked up a couple of trophies
for these documentaries along the way so
what are the challenges the biggest
challenges challenge in any community
service activity like this is
communication communication between
those who serve and those who need the
service and we’ve been very fortunate
the university has supported us and
other similar efforts with a website
called give gap that allows us to
communicate back and forth with groups
and with those who serve and accumulate
how many hours of service they get
because they get that as academic credit
so that’s a nice stimulant for the
learners and we can also provide that to
churches and other groups who want to to
use those we have a lot of problem with
continuing education of those folks we
train that we haven’t broken through and
turnover but like all community efforts
since we’ve decided to go off of funding
from agencies where we end up spending
all of our time writing grants its
finances fortunately Mississippi Public
Broadcasting in the university have
continued to support us and we’re very
grateful for that and we hope that
you’ll get involved thank you
[Applause]
you
you know this is our health statistics
for many many years and it’s a flatline
we’re either 49th or 50th and that’s a
real problem but there are other
problems that are associated with that
that make it even more dire and that is
if you look at the percentage of
Mississippians who now have diabetes
well over 30% and who are obese about
75% of our people are overweight and
obese and you do the projections for
those they’re pretty startling but the
bigger projection is the one on the
bottom there that is a disability rate
in the state and that is an old number
it’s now much higher but it’s not been
released and when you have a quarter or
a third of your population that is
disabled you can’t make your budget work
for the state so this is not only a
personal issue of health but it is a
future issue of the viability of the
state so a group of us at UMC who were
struggling with these issues after being
there for a number of years and seeing
no needle to move on anything asked what
could we do in order to do anything in
medicine especially in Mississippi you
really have to look at the social
determinants of health because that’s
where the rubber meets the road and of
the seven major social determinants of
health we looked at what educators and
clinicians could do and we picked out
four of them now before we could get
started on some kind of document to try
to get some grant
funding to do this because it’s all done
on nights and weekends and we have to
hire some help this happened and this
was another hit to our health system
because basically all healthcare from
the coast to Jackson and including
Jackson shut down after Katrina from
short periods here in Jackson about a
week to ten days
fortunately the University and several
of our hospitals had generators and fuel
but the coasts the doctors left and they
never came back so we were faced with a
situation where we had a significant
percentage of our population with no
health care so one of the things that
the university came up with was an idea
with Public Broadcasting was to put
someone on the on the radio who could
answer everyday health questions and we
ended up developing two of those people
and it was such a success and so highly
utilized that we put that into our
working plan that we were developing for
trying to address some of the issues
that I showed you earlier on so we
called this southern remedy radio
programming to have a catchy name and
our target audience was anyone with low
health literacy and one of the biggest
problems we’ve had is is that we are
missing our target audience using public
broadcasting and that was an issue from
the very beginning the people who were
calling in were the people who had just
gotten back from the Mayo Clinic for
their third consultation for hair loss
and that just didn’t compute to where we
wanted to go so we decided we’re going
to
man the radio show but we’re going to
try to make it more focus and hopefully
get it to podcasts and other social
media where it would be more widely
available and that we also should move
to television but most importantly we
should go we should get troops on the
ground that’s where the action was
troops on the ground so in 2016 we
expanded our radio a programming to 5
hours of live radio dr. talk shows a
week and doctors like me get hoarse
about every other week because we we
catch something from our patients so
that also helped us to substitute for
each other so that was a real backup but
perhaps more importantly was the troops
on the ground aspect and this is one of
the lesser-known efforts of southern
remedy but perhaps the most important
one and that is is that we train lay
individuals and certify them to take
blood pressure what measure blood
glucose measure BMI and do some basic
dietary counseling on-site in churches
and civic organizations and because we
were very fortunate and the medical
school was very unfortunate and not
having any nutrition in our curriculum
in the medical school we were able to
embed this into the curriculum of the
medical school and the nursing school
and now most of the other schools are
coming on board and teach this southern
remedy healthy living curriculum which
was developed with a number of folks
from our various disciplines who have
expertise in this area and now we are
training in every one of our medical
students and every one of our nursing
students most of our PT students and the
dental students and so forth in the
first
year when they’re anxious to get their
hands on patience but don’t have the
skills to do it we’re giving them a
skill set that they can go into
communities and help with screening
because 50% of diabetes and about 50% of
hypertension and Mississippi is
undetected and by the time we get the
patients we have end-stage disease and
that’s why dialysis units in Mississippi
are growing faster than dollar stores
they’re literally everywhere and they’re
just getting started and one of the
reasons we were able to do this is the
federally qualified health center
movement which started in Mississippi
came out of Freedom Summer and has been
perpetuated here and we have more of
these community health centers in rural
areas in our state per capita than any
other state and we also have them in in
urban areas and they charge people on a
sliding scale so really there’s nobody
in Mississippi that doesn’t have access
to health care they just don’t know they
have it so we have incorporated
connecting our individuals to those
community health centers which by the
way the president administration has not
funded as of this hour and the funding
for which will go zero by the first of
the week if it doesn’t get funded but
we’re hopeful that that that will occur
so we can offer people health care even
if that they have no resources we’ve now
done a number of health documentaries
and the real value in these we think is
not the television run times that we get
but they are all put on our website put
into blog sites put into social media
and you may though that our
chicken nugget one actually has broken
national records for replay so you know
that’s where people’s interest is it
will go there we we have now trained
1500 community health advocates and our
tooling up to train a lot more if you’re
interested we want to work with you give
me a call we can send you a medical
student to set up a screening work with
your people to train folks whatever you
need that’s what we want to do and we
also have picked up a couple of trophies
for these documentaries along the way so
what are the challenges the biggest
challenges challenge in any community
service activity like this is
communication communication between
those who serve and those who need the
service and we’ve been very fortunate
the university has supported us and
other similar efforts with a website
called give gap that allows us to
communicate back and forth with groups
and with those who serve and accumulate
how many hours of service they get
because they get that as academic credit
so that’s a nice stimulant for the
learners and we can also provide that to
churches and other groups who want to to
use those we have a lot of problem with
continuing education of those folks we
train that we haven’t broken through and
turnover but like all community efforts
since we’ve decided to go off of funding
from agencies where we end up spending
all of our time writing grants its
finances fortunately Mississippi Public
Broadcasting in the university have
continued to support us and we’re very
grateful for that and we hope that
you’ll get involved thank you
[Applause]
you
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