Social Work and CLS Partner to Offer Campus-Community Health Promotion Fair and Symposium
Published February 24, 2022
By Darlene Muguiro
UTEP College of Health Sciences
On Wednesday, February 9th, 2022, the UTEP REACH and Healthy Families Healthy Kids initiative jointly organized a health promotion fair and symposium. Over 100 UTEP students, faculty, staff, and community members participated in the event, which was held at the El Paso Natural Gas Conference Center.
The event was directed by Dr. Yok-Fong Paat, Associate Professor of Social Work. The Healthy Families Healthy Kids Initiative is a five-year grant project funded through the Health Resources and Services Administration, which aims to address the need for preventive health care and health information in the U.S.-Mexico border region. REACH (Resilience, Education, Action, Commitment, and Humanity) is a two-year grant project funded through the Department of Homeland Security, which aims to prevent targeted violence through community capacity-building and awareness-raising.
Paat worked with Elizabeth Camacho (also part of REACH and Healthy Families Healthy Kids Initiative), clinical faculty instructor and clinical coordinator of the Clinical Laboratory Sciences (CLS) Program to provide health screenings to the attendees. Twenty-two CLS seniors provided screenings for attendees to include BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose, and also conducted urinalyses to assess kidney function. In addition to the screenings, attendees were able to attend a health promotion symposium on preventive health, entitled “Improving Women’s Health across the Life Span: Closing Gaps and Building Wellness” by Dr. Sireesha Reddy, Professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Texas Tech University Health Science Center in El Paso. During the event, community partners Texas Tech, Project VIDA, UTEP CARE (Campus Advocacy Resources and Education), and the El Paso Center for Diabetes hosted informational booths while the City of El Paso offered HIV screenings for attendees and information about COVID-19.
Go Miners!
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Camacho