Nationwide Campaign for Minority Women Promotes Simple Steps to Health

Local Effort Led By Indiana University School of Medicine

INDIANAPOLIS - Recognizing that many minority women have little time, energy or resources to devote to their health, a new community-based preventive healthcare campaign will be launched during the Minority Health Fair at Indiana Black Expo. The campaign will focus on helping women take simple, time-sensitive steps to improve their health.

Previous health campaigns have emphasized goals with complex components, such as weight loss or smoking cessation.

This campaign, dubbed Pick Your Path to Health, is designed to be compatible with today's multi-tasking, multi-cultural society by suggesting specific, lifestyle-friendly action steps - such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator - to stay on a path to wellness. This campaign, initiated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women's Health, encourages health awareness among all women but focuses on Americans of African, Asian and Hispanic descents.

Local efforts led by the IU School of Medicine includes distributing healthy living daily planners to women of color at health fairs and clinics and facilitating presentations by IU health care providers to women's church groups.

The goal of Pick Your Path to Health is to bring together key community-based activities with national efforts that are ultimately aimed at eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health status. Research shows that despite gains made in life expectancy in the United States during the past century, gaps in health outcomes persist among ethnic groups. For example, African American women are 25 percent more likely to die from a heart attack and 86 percent more likely to die from a stroke than are Caucasian women.

"While outreach efforts by the medical community have improved, disparities in medical care and educational opportunities still exist for women belonging to underrepresented groups in our community," said Rose Fife, M.D., director of the Indiana University National Center of Excellence in Women's Health. "This campaign is an effort to reach these women and to provide them with basic health information and manageable programs to help them achieve healthier lifestyles."

Multiple local organizations have partnered with IU in this outreach, including IU Medical Group, the IU School of Medicine National Center of Excellence in Women's Health and Wishard Health Services. Other contributors to the campaign include the Marion County Health Department, Kroger, the American Diabetes Association, Cole Brothers Calcium Water and the Coca Cola Bottling Company.

Pick Your Path to Health was designed to be allied with Healthy People 2010 goals that were announced in January by HHS. More information about the national campaign is available from the Office on Women's Health at http://www.4woman.gov

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Pamela Su Perry
pperry@iupui.edu
317-274-7722

INDIANA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

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