According to the calendar spring started last month, so why are we forecasted to get an inch or more of snow this weekend??!! April is supposed to be full of perfect days to go out and enjoy the great outdoors! I guess we can all hope for a warm-up soon.
Even with unseasonable weather swirling about around us, the great work our students, faculty and staff are all doing continues at Salus.
Please join me in congratulating our newest PhD’s:
- Robert Andersson whose topic was: Justifying the Need for Mandated Comprehensive Eye Care in Nursing Homes
- Richard Hom whose topic was: Food Insecurity and Vision Impairment among Adults in the United States
- Mashael Namaeh whose topic was: A Normative Study of Objective Measures of Disparity Vergence in Children 9 to 17 years old
- Lauren Sponseller whose topic was: Exploring Occupational Therapy's Role with Mothers Who Breastfeed
All four successfully defended their dissertations recently. We’re so proud of all of these fine professionals!
Yesterday, a team of students and faculty were at the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) participating in our Veteran’s Readiness Initiative. The event, which included optometry, audiology, speech-language pathology and for the first time, PA students and faculty provided multisensory screenings to veterans and, at the request of CCP, non-veterans with the goal of identifying and removing any potential barriers to reintegration and educational success. The program is designed to identify symptoms that could be associated with post-concussive injuries and were exposed to conditions that might have caused either mild or moderate Traumatic Brain Injury.
Congratulations to Mr. Bob Serianni - we've just learned that Bob has been nominated as the next president of the Pennsylvania Speech-Language-Hearing Association! He will serve a three-year term: President Elect in 2019, President in 2020, and Past President in 2021. So, Salus will be at the forefront of SLP in the Commonwealth in the coming years!!!
On Saturday, optometry, audiology and SLP students and faculty will be participating in the Montgomery County Wellness Expo from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. at Montgomery County Community College MCCC. Students and staff will be providing vision, hearing and speech screenings for local residents and MCCC students, faculty and staff. This is a great opportunity to assist the local community as well as to generate necessary referrals to our Salus clinical facilities.
On Tuesday, 10 April, we will be celebrating National Library Week in our Learning Resource Center. There will be a reception at 12 p.m. with light refreshments - you are all invited to attend!
I wanted to conclude this week’s update with a discussion that I believe we all need to be paying close attention to. Wednesday evening Brian Zuckerman, John Gaal and I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion that included Dr. David Nash, founding dean of the School of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University and Melissa Weiler Gerber, the president and CEO of Access Matters (www.accessmatters.org), a Philadelphia nonprofit formerly called the Family Planning Council that helps to ensure access to sexual and reproductive health assets. Dr. Nash is a physician who also holds an MBA, is a nationally recognized expert on health economics and practice and holds an honorary degree from Salus, in addition to all his other accomplishments. Ms. Gerber is a nationally recognized advocate for Women’s health and was formally head of Women’s Way.
The discussion ranged from the future of the Affordable Care Act to equitable access to care for minorities and the poor in our city. Dr. Nash noted that the U.S. spends more money than any other country for healthcare yet our outcomes don’t even rise to the top ten as compared to other industrialized nations. He drilled down further and when comparing fetal mortality rates in Ghana to Philadelphia, our city looked more like a third-world country than Ghana. It’s a sad commentary on how Philadelphia’s unprivileged, which represents almost one-fourth of the city’s population have access to prenatal care but more importantly, are subject to the social determinant of health. Dr. Nash pointed out that only 15% of health outcomes are related to direct access to a health system. That means 85% of one’s health is directly related to other things such as safe housing and local food markets, access to educational, economic, and job opportunities, access to healthcare services, quality education and job training, availability of community-based resources in support of community living and opportunities for recreational and leisure-time activities and transportation options, to name a few. These are the social determinants of health.
Ms. Gerber added that there appears to be a “war on the poor” where programs that have historically educated and cared for women, such as Planned Parenthood and others are at risk due to budget cuts and political pressures to discontinue them. She stressed how important it was for underprivileged women to have access to these types of support services to assure people receive adequate healthcare and health guidance. Ms. Gerber also highlighted the positive impact Medicaid has had on this population in enabling people to obtain necessary sexual and reproductive healthcare services.
Finally, Dr. Nash pointed out that only 3% of Americans currently practice what has been defined as a “healthy lifestyle” which includes daily exercise, no smoking, eating fruits and vegetables, using a seatbelt when driving and having a normal body mass index. That’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of health in America and a major, contributing factor in why our healthcare costs are so high.
You may be asking yourself why I’ve spent so much time on this. I don’t believe there is any topic more vital to raising the awareness and improving the overall health of our community and the nation than these issues. It’s also embedded in our Salus mission to be part of the solution. At Salus, we do a great job of teaching how to and ultimately provide high quality care for all of our patients and clients. It is also incumbent upon us to be very cognizant of all those other things – those social determinants - that directly affect most of our patient and clients. We need to be asking them about their diets – are they getting three meals a day, do they have adequate housing, do they have access to other healthcare providers, etc.? If we find they are not, we can potentially have a great impact on their lives by connecting them with appropriate social and other services that can hopefully assist.
I apologize for the length of this update but felt it was important to share some commentary of my insightful evening. I hope you all take some time to reflect on those, as well as on how lucky we all are to be in a position to help move this in the right direction.
Have a great weekend, take some time to spend with friends and family and stay safe!
Mike
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