By Christina Orlovsky, contributor
No matter where you are, sitting in a waiting room can be a long, tedious process—one that often makes you wish you brought a book to entertain you. Now, at select locations throughout the state of Pennsylvania, waiting women won’t want for reading material, thanks to the new Women’s Wellness Guide, an informational kiosk that teaches women in underserved areas about health and wellness.
With a goal of education and empowerment, the Women’s Wellness Guide kiosks have the potential to create knowledgeable patients for health care providers.
Provided by the Pennsylvania Commission for Women, a nonprofit organization that advocates for women’s interests, the kiosks are funded by a grant from the Highmark Foundation, a charitable organization that supports programs aimed at improving community health.
“I had seen the application of the technology in other things and thought it would be great for women’s health,” explained Leslie Stiles, executive director of the Pennsylvania Commission for Women.
“In our state we have statistics that say that less than 60 percent of homes are wired for the Internet,” she adds. “We always talk about getting information from Web sites, but a lot of that information isn’t available to the woman at risk—the one who’s walking around with a lump in her breast for six months because the person she invariably neglects is herself.”
Realizing that women are often caregivers of everyone but themselves, Stiles set out to empower underserved women to get educated on health topics that affect them—providing it at their fingertips in a comprehensive, easy-to-read format.
The first Women’s Wellness Guide was installed this past fall in the waiting room of the Allegheny County Jail, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—a facility that welcomes roughly 200 visitors per day, 90 percent of whom are women. The bilingual, touch-screen kiosk encourages users to “take hold of their health,” as its tagline reads, and offers them information on such topics as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, asthma, diet and exercise, weight management, smoking, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases.
Additionally, a section on health insurance educates the primarily uninsured women on free health care resources that are available to them, while help lines provide a place to turn to handle sensitive personal issues. Information is available in a straightforward bulleted format or in a question-and-answer-style vignette format.
“I wanted to give women the opportunity to tap into information for themselves—to talk about a diagnosis and give them questions to ask their doctors,” she continued. “As women, we tend to be passive. The message here is for them to take control.”
In addition to the kiosk at the Allegheny County Jail, 12 more kiosks have been funded for distribution throughout Pennsylvania, in other correctional facilities, Women, Infant and Children (WIC) Centers, public health facilities and, Stiles hopes, supermarkets. The idea is for a kiosk to remain in one location for at least six months to a year to provide consistency and increase awareness of its availability.
With a goal of education and empowerment, Stiles concluded that the Women’s Wellness Guide kiosks have the potential to create knowledgeable patients for health care providers.
“Health care providers, including nurses, are the professionals whose responsibility it is to care for these women. But we want women to take responsibility for their own health—it’s one of the most important things they can do,” she said. “We want them to access their providers, come with questions, come with knowledge, and understand the nature of prevention and the tests that are available to them to prevent disease. This way, when they get to their nurse or other provider, they are already educated. It makes them better patients, which in turn makes them much more treatable.”
For more information, visit the Pennsylvania Commission for WomenWeb site.
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