HDI and UK HealthCare have long had a fruitful partnership leading to a lot of great work – and their latest initiatives will be no exception.
The two are collaborating on a pair of new projects focused on supporting community health through universal design, and the people spearheading them are excited about where they could lead.
“Part of our UK HealthCare Healthy Kentucky Initiative budget is held back for collaborative community work with campus partners to further our collective strategic goals,” said Jenni Jinright, Healthy Kentucky Initiatives Manager for UK HealthCare.
Lindsey Mullis, Universal Health and Wellness Director, noted that UK HealthCare often collaborates on projects like this, which both benefits the community and keeps ties between departments in the university strong.
“We are working towards building community capacity, but emphasizing the high quality resources that are within the university when we can partner together,” Mullis said.
The first of these initiatives will partner with the Barnstable Brown Diabetes Center to create accessible education materials about diabetes, while the other seeks to take an evidence-based fitness practice called Bingocize and adapt it to more diverse groups.
Both projects will heavily emphasize universal design to ensure that as many people can benefit from them as possible.
With the diabetes education materials, HDI and UK HealthCare hope to expand the public’s knowledge of diabetes outside of patient populations. To that end, these new resources will be available not only in the clinic setting but also at free community diabetes prevention and management classes and health fairs so they can learn more about what people need to know regarding diabetes.
“What I’m excited about is having those universally designed handouts for the community members to take home so that the information that’s conveyed day of is something that they can refer back to and it’s easily digestible and understandable,” Jinright said. “If you historically look back over our branded material…they look at it from a health literacy lens, not really a universal design lens. I am super excited to have some material that that is more appropriate for a larger audience.”
Meanwhile, with Bingocize, the aim of the collaboration is to take a proven method that is primarily targeted toward older adults and expand it to wider audiences including youth and people with disabilities, again using principles of universal design.
The idea behind Bingocize is exactly what it sounds like – games of bingo with occasional breaks for all players to do physical activity together. The idea is to create a program that goes beyond exercise and reaches out to more varied populations. These classes will leverage College of Health Sciences Movement Mentors as facilitators and be promoted to UK HealthCare patients as well as the community at large.
“You can choose to do more than just exercise, but also have health education modules within the game itself,” Mullis said. “We created a universal wellness module that is not only universally designed, but it’s written at a fourth grade reading level. There’s graphics and images incorporated, so there’s multiple methods of engagement. We refilmed that exercise videos to be not just one older adult, to have a range of diverse races ethnicity, age, ability.”
Both these programs also have the benefit of strengthening the bond between UK HealthCare and HDI, something Mullis said will have powerful effects as the two organizations continue to work together.
“I’ve adored getting to know Jenni and the work that’s going on with the Healthy Kentucky Initiative.” Mullis said. “I’m grateful that we’ve been able to not just build our partnership, but then also enhance other partnerships that the Healthy Kentucky Initiative is working with.”
