Patient and Health Education
Raising awareness and health education are critical elements of every health center's outreach efforts to individual patients and the community as a whole. One easy way to build an outreach program for your center is to tie your center activities to programs that are already in place throughout the community. National Health Observances are a perfect platform from which you could begin. The observances are special days, week, or months that have been created to raise awareness of health issues. For example, October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and many health care providers tap into the promotions that occur throughout the country to bring awareness to their own community – they may offer discounts on mammograms during the month, be a sponsor of a 5K run, or send breast self-exam reminders to patients.
Although many organizations have declared special observances for their individual cause, National Health Observances have received official recognition from U.S. Congress, the White House, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The official recognition means that many HHS and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) resources are available for you to use. One of the easiest tools to use is the website for National Health Observances.
Each month one health observance is featured in a toolkit. The toolkit is full of information and ideas to engage the public in health promotion activities and offers you articles, reminder cards, even social media messages that you can customize for your use. Each toolkit contains:
- Sample Announcement
- Sample Tweets
- E-cards
- Web Badges
- Get Involved
- Related Tools
- Additional Resources
In addition to the toolkits, the Healthfinder link includes relevant news articles, quick guides for healthy living, and numerous links to other health resources.
