Region 10 and Alaska Native T/TA Health Conference Call Notes

Topic: Staff Wellness
Moderator: Allison Hertel, T/TA Health Specialist
January 16, 2008, 1:00 pm CT

Coordinator:

Good afternoon and thank you all for holding. Your lines have been placed on a listen-only mode until the question and answer portion of today's conference.

I would like to remind all parties, today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections to please disconnect at this time.

I would now like to turn the call over to Miss (Ally) Hertel. Thank you. You may begin.

Allison Hertel:

Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone. Thank you for your patience getting on the phone. I know there are at least 45 phone callers out there and hopefully you have people with you in your office.

Just a couple logistics – one is, there is a PowerPoint presentation that goes with today's call. If you do not have a copy of that and would like one, feel free to call Annelle Bogus in our office. Her phone number is 206-615-3648 or you can send her a quick email at annelle.bogus@acf.hhs.gov and she will send you those materials right now.

Just to start off, in December about half of the Region 10 grantees participated in the I Am Moving, I Am Learning training here in Seattle and the program staff that participated just ran away charged and enthusiastic about integrating physical activity and nutrition into the program environment.

In some of the evaluations, people expressed interest in getting more ideas and strategies on how to do staff health and so this caused really, an opportunity to do a presentation and then provide some time for dialogue and discussion about ways that you might do staff health and support staff wellness in your program.

So I thought we'd start with something to think about. One, is that it's a brand new year and so virtually you're all out there and it's really hard for me to do this without seeing you but I thought we could kind of do a virtual hand raise with people that are in your office or with you and raise your hand if you developed a New Year's resolution that has to do with health. And if you're like the majority of Americans, your resolution might be to spend more time with your family, tame the bulge, get fit, stop smoking, or enjoy life more but here we are back into our work routine and it's so easy to get sidetracked.

For example, your work day might start with a two-hour management meeting where someone has brought donuts, croissants and coffee. You sit there for two hours and you leave frustrated and overwhelmed with the amount of work that you were just assigned. You go back to your desk. You find 28 unread emails, three urgent phone messages and are interrupted by a teacher who has an emergency with a child in the classroom.

By the time you get back to your desk, it is 12:30, you're starving. You run out, get some takeout and consume the whole thing. Oh goodness, it's now 1 pm and it's time for that staffing on three very challenging children. That ends up lasting until 3 pm. Before you know it's 4 o'clock. You've only read four – five of those emails. You've got four phone calls to make and you are wiped out.

If this is your typical work day, it's no wonder that your New Year's resolution to get healthy, take breaks, exercise and eat right can get thrown out the window. This is our reality in Head Start, often. Hopefully, this call will help you to come up with ways to support your staff and to support the resolutions.

I hope to provide you with some strategies to focus some of your creative energy on providing a supportive environment that embraces wellness with your program. And while you might not be able to implement every idea that's presented here, I challenge you to think of one or two ways that you can embrace wellness not only for your staff but also for yourself.

Each of the slides are labeled with a number and so I'm going to try to refer to which slide I'm on throughout the presentation. The first slide gives an overview of the agenda. About half way through we're going to have a Virtual Wellness Break which will be facilitated by my colleague, (Alison Laughlin). Just a quick way to get you moving. If you do conference calls with your staff, this might be one way you can do wellness activities from afar.

At the conclusion of the presentation, we'll open the phone line for questions or comments about ways that you have implemented staff wellness activities in your program. And please take care of yourself during the call. If you need to, get up. Walk around the table. Stretch your legs. Get a drink of water. Eat your lunch. And a reminder, you don't have to do everything. Small steps.

Slide number 2 is Healthy People 2010 Goal. Healthy People 2010 is a framework for prevention for the nation. It's designed to identify the most significant preventable threats to our health and to establish national goals to reduce those threats.

One of the goals is around health promotion. The goal is that 50% of worksites employing 50 or more persons will provide programs to prevent or reduce employee stress. At this point, nationally we are far from reaching this goal. Most Head Start programs employ more than 50 people so this is something for your employer to consider.

Here are a few questions. When you think of a healthy work place, what does that mean to you? How often do you feel stress during the work day and does your program – does your employer offer an active program to prevent or reduce stress? How do we as Head Start programs develop a healthy climate in our work place? It's an opportunity where healthy behaviors can be supported but they can also be threatened by the day to day things that we experience.

Before we go any further, I want to give a little bit of background on health promotion. Slide 3 gives a definition of what health promotion is. It's the science and art of helping people change their lifestyle to move towards the state of optimal health. Head Starts can support that by facilitating some efforts, including enhancing awareness. You can help change behaviors and you can create an environment that supports good health practices.

Of these components, research shows that supportive environments will have the greatest impact on producing lasting change. People spend at least 8 hours a day in the work environment. Some people spend 10 hours a day. So think about the role that your work environment plays in supporting and producing lasting change around health promotion and moving towards the state of optimal health.

The next slide talks about Health Education. Think about the role that your work environment can play in helping staff identify health needs and priorities for their own personal health, obtaining more information and resources relating to health and wellness and mobilizing into action.

Again, you are encouraged to create an environment where there are supports set up for both individuals and within the organizational structure so that people can make their own informed and voluntary decisions around healthy behaviors.

You may ask why an organization wants to play a role in this and what benefit does it really have? We understand the six dimensions of wellness and how it correlates to optimal health. We can better understand the role that they play in designing a worksite health promotion program.

Slide 5 talks about The Six Dimensions of Wellness. There's Social wellness, which has to do with communities, families and friends; Occupational and Environmental; Spiritual, which is love and hope and charity; Physical which has to do with fitness, nutrition, medical and control of substance abuse. I think that's where we often think of health. There's Intellectual Health, which has to do with education, career development and Emotional Health, care for emotional crises, stress management.

Wellness is the condition of well-being beyond the absence of disease. It's really building a level of optimal health for people and it's going to be different and unique for each person and I think that's really important to consider in the work environment.

The next slide is Slide 6 and it helps provide some information as to Why To Focus On Staff Health. Organizations are generally looking for results in these four areas. They're looking to support employee health, to reduce health care costs, to improve employee morale and productivity and to reduce absenteeism.

According to the Wellness Councils of America, the 6 key reasons on your slide represent why to develop a worksite health promotion program. For example, in 2003 the United States spent over $1.66 trillion in health care, much of which can be linked to people's health habits.

Preventable illnesses make up for 70% of all illness-related costs and according to a recent national poll, 78% of Americans described their jobs as stressful. This all has an impact on employee health. It has an impact on costs that employers are paying toward health insurance. It impacts absenteeism and it impacts productivity.

On the next slide, there are a few facts on Health and Productivity. On average, United States employers spend over – it costs them over $1,685 per employee per year in productivity losses related to personal and family health problems. That's over $225 billion annually.

Worksite health promotion programs have been shown to reduce sick leave absenteeism by 28%, to reduce health care costs by 26% and to reduce worker's compensation claims by 30%. There's a huge savings when we do health promotion programs. And while this information focuses on really large employers that have spent millions of dollars on health promotion programs, there are simple, smaller ways that we all can help improve productivity and employee wellness.

The next slide is just a fun little quote that I found in a resource that will be showed later and it says that the only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck.

Slide number 9 talks about how to – How Do We Implement a Wellness Program? As with any program, when you implement something new, it's important that you go through a process. And what is described in this slide might represent the process that you go through to develop and implement a wellness program.

The reality is that this takes a lot of time. You can spend weeks developing a wellness committee, gathering information, developing a program plan, implementing it, testing it, revising it but at the same time, we can make some simple changes in our programs that can have an immediate impact on staff wealth – staff health.

I'm going to give you a few quick and practical things that you can do today, tomorrow and in the next week to enhance staff wellness. From there, when and if you have more time, maybe this summer, you can focus on developing a more comprehensive approach to staff wellness.

One quick note is that I did give you some resources in my email. One of which is a healthy workplace survey. That might be a starting point to do an assessment of your program and your work environment to see how you rate on a scale of wellness.

Slide number 10 talks about Choosing Priorities. So as a program – as a program staff or management staff, you need to make the decision as to how much you feel you can do right now. How much do you really have control over, versus how much does the Human Resources department or the director or the larger grantee need to be involved in your staff wellness program?

Think about those short and long-term solutions and hopefully you'll get some resources that will stimulate your creative thinking and will lead to positive outcomes and healthier staff.

You may look at all of these priorities as important, so you might choose a sampling of each of them, whether it's focusing on the disease and illness prevention or health education or really looking at some of the environmental things in your program.

It's important to take into consideration how to build your priorities to include the six dimensions of wellness into each of them, such as Spiritual Health, Intellectual Health, Social Health and Emotional Health.

The next slide focuses on Disease and Illness Prevention. Here are a few ways that you could do health promotion programs targeting disease and illness. You could set up something where you're encouraging staff to get preventive and primary health care. Maybe you have a staff health policy that requires them to get a physical exam every two years or three years. You could offer health screenings in your programs, whether it's a diabetes screening or doing blood pressure on a regular basis, cholesterol screenings. You could do Body Mass Index or teach staff how to do it for themselves.

You could offer vaccinations for your program staff. You could partner with a health department and have them come in and do flu shots annually for your teachers. You could provide information on age-appropriate screenings and tests. For example, the right hand visual is General Screenings and Immunizations for Women and it talks about different ages and what we should be having as we go in for our annual exams. There's also one of these available on that Website for men.

And then, you could also provide flex time for staff to get their medical and dental exams and allow them to have a flexible schedule where they have some freedom to go do what they need to with their health.

The next slide talks about Health Promotion Activities. One idea, is to implement a 10,000 steps a day program. A lot of people have pedometers now or maybe you could apply for a small grant to get pedometers or just see if people will buy their own. And you could encourage and have challenges around people getting 10,000 steps a day.

You could develop staff bulletin boards, have an article in a newsletter, post flyers throughout the program environment that focuses on a different health topic. If you're lucky, you might work for an organization that could provide discounts to health clubs, provide prenatal classes to pregnant staff, provide smoking cessation or tobacco cessation classes or do other health-related events that really are health promotion.

You could provide support to staff to prevent burnout. Think in our line of work, we often hear that staff get burned out and it's really important to do some things that are built into your programs to help prevent that. Maybe you offer support groups or even getting people out walking will have an effect on preventing burnout.

I think we often do Family Health Fairs for the families in our programs. We'll do Family Nights that focus on health. Well, what about doing something like that just for staff, where you're incorporating family health topics that are important to them in their personal lives but you're doing it as a way to do health promotion for your staff. I read one idea that talked about developing a staff relaxation room. I can just envision what that would look like.

A lot of these activities really support staff health. Think about the impacts that doing something like this might have in the longer term on absenteeism or lowering health care costs if we're helping staff get healthy.

The next slide focuses on Health Education Opportunities. We often do a CPR training and a First-Aid training for staff but let's think about some other ways that we can do health education such as a training on employee health issues that are related to disease and illness prevention; classes on Child Safety and Parenting or Labor and Delivery or Child Development for staff who are parents that might not have a Child Development background.

We could have Health and Nutrition information available and accessible to staff so that if they're not comfortable asking about it, they still would have opportunity to get the information.

At the I Am Moving, I Am Learning training, we had serving size displays during meal times to talk about what really does a serving look like? So you could have a visual during staff meetings that shows a plate of food and what a real serving would look like.

How many of you have staff trainings on your employee benefits and really understanding what is available to you as an employee of the agency with which you work? You might have trainings on Diabetes Education, on Cancer Prevention. You might have an education on how to begin an exercise program if you don't even know where to start.

On the next slide, we're talking about some Organizational Norms That Are Related to Healthy Behaviors. There are things that we know that are in our control and there's things that are out of our control, related to our organizations and the cultures within. The question is, how can we play a role in creating an organizational culture that embraces wellness.

What does our employee benefits package look like? Do we have health insurance for our family – our employees and their families? Do we have an employee assistance program where staff can access support for a mental health services? Do we offer staff incentives to participate in wellness programs and wellness activities? We all love incentives. Even if we can't afford it with financial incentives, we could offer bike helmets or gift certificates or solicit donations from our community to help embrace and encourage employees to participate in healthy activities.

I think one quick thing we could do is look at how we do our staff meetings and our trainings. Do we have healthy food and beverage options? If you offer cookies or brownies or donuts, do you still have fruit and yogurt as an alternative for people that may want to make a healthier choice? Do you offer stretch and movement breaks – an opportunity for staff to get up and move – or are you sitting on your tush for a good hour or two hours?

And on an emotional and social level, are the meetings that we have, are they supportive and collaborative? Are they open to dialogue and questions where you really feel like you are a part of the decision-making process?

Additionally, maybe we could look at offering fitness and nutrition classes and trainings for our staff. Do we have opportunities to do physical activities during our breaks and our lunches or do we even have a break or a lunch? Think about your vending machines in your programs. What beverage and foods do you have in them? Is there a way to get rid of the regular soda and put juice or water or other beverages in there that might be a healthier option?

And then, how about a flexible work environment? Do you have telecommuting options or flexible work days or the flexibility to leave and go to a doctor's appointment through the day?

And then the last area is Environmental Health. And I don't know if we always think about Environmental Health when we think about a worksite health promotion program, but there's a lot of ways to support and promote health – staff health, that are related to the environment in which we work.

It's a fact that 80% of people experience back pain at some point in their lives. How many of you, including myself as – and as I'm asking this, are slouching right now in your chair? And I bet we're all sitting up straight now. Think about your office chair; your computer screen. Are you hunching over? Are you squinting to see your screen?

Have you ever thought about bringing in an ergonomic specialist or someone who might be able to look at your work environment and really offer some quick solutions to promote better posture or less straining on your eyes?

Have you thought about – we often do accident reports for the kids in our program, but what about for staff? You look at where accidents are happening or injuries are happening and looking at safety issues that are related to those that might lead to worker's compensation claims. So how can we prevent future accidents from happening?

Have you ever done proper lifting demonstrations where you learn how to properly lift a box or a child or move things in your program? Think about Going Green. I think that's kind of the big term right now. There's Going Green and looking at the cleaning products we use and the impact it has – they have on our program.

Looking at your policies relating to staff, you probably have a staff health policy. You probably have a tobacco-free policy. What other policies or philosophies or procedures do you have that really embrace and support staff wellness?

At this point, I'm going to take a pause and we're going to do a quick Virtual Wellness Break. So, (Alison) I'm going to turn it over to you for a minute.

(Alison Laughlin):

Thanks (Ali). Good morning, everybody. We're going to do a short stretch movement break together and we're going to do some stretches that we can do while sitting at your desk or they could also be used for a wellness break during a meeting when people are sitting in a chair.

So you - I'd like you all to be sitting in a chair with both feet flat on the floor. It'd help if you hands are free, so if you have a headset or can go on speakerphone, now is a good time to do that.

This is our first telephone wellness break. It was a challenge to find things we could do over the phone. So I hope you'll all join in, even though we can't see you. Sometimes I think that's a good thing on a phone conference.

I'll lead you with my voice and the instructions are also on Slide 16. So remember, as with all activities, listen to your body and stop if it hurts or if it doesn't seem wise.

Is everybody ready? Sit up straight in your chair with both feet flat on the floor. Look straight ahead. And now slowly, reach around behind yourself with your right hand and grasp the top right-hand corner of your chair with your right hand. You can bend your elbow. And the further away from the back of the seat you are, the more intense the stretch. So get yourself comfortable with that hand holding to the back of your chair and then complete the stretch by moving your left hand as close as possible to your right hand. Stretch as far as you can and hold it for 15 seconds. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

Good. Now, let's do the other side. Taking your left hand, grasp the top right-hand corner of your chair with your right hand and your other hand as close as possible to your right hand and stretch, holding it. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. You can work up to repeating that five times on each side, but just for demonstration, we'll just do it once.

So now, move your chair a little bit away from your desk so you have room to stretch and interlock your fingers and turn your palms outward and extend your arms away from your body as far as you can. Keep your back straight, and your arms parallel to the table or the desk. Now, bow your head slightly. Listen to your neck. Count to five. One, two, three, four, five and then lift your head back up slowly.

Let's do that one more time. With your fingers interlocked, palms faced outward, your hands extending away, dip your head down slowly -- one, two, three, four, five -- and then lift it back up slowly.

How did that feel? Those stretches aren't vigorous activity but they get your body moving and your blood flowing, stretching your muscles and is an important part of staying active in order to maintain a healthy weight. And wellness breaks help you feel alert and focused.

What we showed you was two of the chair's – two of the five chair stretches from the We Can program. We Can energize our parents. It's a parent program leaders guide and we've given you the links there. It has three other wellness breaks you can use yourself or with staff or parents and it also has lots of great activities and good nutrition exercises that you can use.

That's the end of our Virtual Wellness Break. Back to you, Ali.

Allison Hertel:

Thank you, (Alison). Okay. We are going to move on to Slide 17 which just is a little visual and really the question is, how do we develop a program that meets the needs of all of our employees? I think often we get this idea that we're going to do this one thing, everyone's going to participate and love it. And the reality is that our staff are at different stages of change and really not sure how much they want to participate in things.

Slide 18 just gives you a couple questions to think about and, you know, how do you develop a program that meets the needs of staff? What do you do when you have some staff that are really excited and others that are so disinterested and don't really want to change behaviors and are asking for the – where the donuts are when you put the fruit out. And how does – how do you make a worksite wellness program that meets the needs of all your staff?

Just going to spend a minute talking about stages of change and where you staff fall within the five aspects of the stages of change and how you can – how your staff health promotion program can support that.

If you have staff that are in the Pre-Contemplation stage, there is no intention to change their behavior. They might not even be aware that they have a "problem" or that there is an issue and that they need to change. So a way to work with these staff is to provide and put posters in the staff room — it's really about raising awareness. And doing tastings of different foods that are prepared in a healthy way or providing more options of vegetables so that they can try new foods.

If you have staff in a Contemplation stage, these people are aware of a problem. They know that there is something going on that's not right and they're thinking about overcoming it but they have not yet made that commitment to take actions. So for that, you might have pictures of easy steps you can take to be healthy. You might have models of fatty foods or other models that they can touch and see and you could help raise more awareness. Sometimes you'll see public health messaging out there that uses fear tactics messages, where you see the story of people that became very ill and sick as a result of a certain health behavior that they have.

In Preparation, individuals in this stage really intend on taking action and they might say they're going to take action in the next month. So those are the people that are, "By golly, on January 1, I'm going to start that new way of eating that's healthy." But they have not successfully taken action in the past. So for these people, it's really about getting a buddy and making a commitment to someone and writing that action plan and setting a date.

For people that are In Action, people are modifying their behaviors, their experiences and their environments in order to overcome their problems. They are the people that have written up contracts, that are excited to start that daily walk around the park. And so you want to create an environment that really reinforces their behavior change.

And if you have staff that are in a Maintenance phase, maybe they have successfully lost weight or they have decided and have successfully been taking an hour lunch break where they're getting 30 minutes of walking in, for them you want to really provide a supportive environment and continue to do the same things where their alternative and new behaviors are being supported as a program.

The next slide is just a few different examples of posters that you can use to reach all staff – of – regardless of where they're at. Just a couple facts about how to eat smart at work or using the stairs instead of riding an elevator.

The next couple slides, starting on Slide 21, provide 10 things – and this is just off the top of my head – that you can do today relating to worksite wellness. I'm guilty of the first one. For three years, I had a candy dish at my desk and it's no longer there. So how many of you have a candy dish at your desk or in your office? Removing it or research even shows if it's not visible, if it has a lid and it's covered and people can't see what's in it, you're less likely to eat the candy.

You could add a staff bulletin board that encourages physical activity, healthy nutrition choices, or choose another topic that might be of interest for you right now. You could try to set up a meeting with your director right now to discuss worksite wellness and where you want to go with it. You could research one of the Websites that's going to be mentioned next. You could add a walking break to your Outlook calendar and set up a reminder system and take that break every day and get outside and walk.

On the next slide, it gives five more. You could put up signs encouraging people to get up and move. If you're going out for lunch after this meeting, instead of ordering two entrees, you could order one and split it with your colleague or friend. You could add a movement activity to your staff or management meeting. You can take the stairs instead of taking the elevator both up and down and you can take a break from your computer, close your eyes, move your legs and stretch your arms.

Take a minute and circle one thing that you are going to do today.

Okay. The next few slides are some online resources and ideas that are examples that are available that might give you some new strategies to implement worksite wellness. And I'm going to just quickly run through them and then we'll open it up for questions.

The first one, starting on Slide 24 is healthfinder.gov. This has been sent out to you before. And the neat thing about this Website is that it has all of these kind of virtual online checkups that you can do to screen yourself. It ranges from, getting your BMI, looking at cancer risks, thinking about sun protection. And there's just an array of online checkups you can take.

If you want to focus on staff wellness, you can use the monthly health observances that the Website has. For example, February is American Heart Month. So what can you do to support staff heart health? March is National Nutrition Month. How can you incorporate National Nutrition Month into your staff meetings? April 7 through the 13 is National Public Health Week. And the focus of National Public Health Week is climate change in the nation's health. So how do you – how can you raise awareness around – for staff around climate change and what we can do to Go Green?

The next slide is My Pyramid Tracker. This is an online dietary and physical activity tool that provides information on the quality of your diet, on your physical activity. It provides nutrition messages and links to nutrients and physical activity information.

On the right side of the slide is an actual plan that was developed for an individual based on their weight, their age and their gender. So it helps you map out how many fruits and vegetables and grains you individually, based on your own weight, need in a day. You could send this link to staff and encourage them to sign up. And there's a tracking system on it where staff can just do it individually and no one else has to know what their diet looks like.

The next Website is America on the Move. This is a new Website that I just found and it's really neat. This one offers free personalized online resources, interactive tools, community support and it provides the links to fun events in your local community. One of the neat things about this Website is if you do have access to pedometers you can do what I call these cyberwalks and for example, you can take the Iditarod Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail or the Oregon Trail. And it gives you this route and you have, for example, the Pacific Crest Trail. You have 42 days to complete it but it requires an average of 10,095 steps per day.

So it helps you set goals on how many steps you need to take in a day to reach the end of the trail. You can register as a team, so as a Head Start program. You can do this as an individually. You know, and then I'm thinking o get creative and do it as a classroom where you're incorporating it with the children and getting them moving and it's also learning opportunity for them around different walks and trails.

The next Website is a Small Steps Adult and Teen Website. This is a Website that has activity trackers, diet planning, portion control and sizes. You can get a daily newsletter. And the other fun thing about this, you might have seen these on billboards, is it talks about small steps you can take to improve your health, such as take a Sunday walk instead of a Sunday drive or order your latte or hot chocolate with fat-free milk or before going back for seconds, wait 10 or 15 minutes. You might not want seconds. Take a walk or do exercise – desk exercises instead of a cigarette or coffee break.

The next Website is the Eat Smart Move More North Carolina Website. This Website provides more detailed information on how to develop and implement a more comprehensive worksite wellness initiative. There's features including healthy meeting guides, how to do a stair initiative using the stairs. It talks about bringing fresh produce to your work setting, smart snacking and how to get moving more. There are downloadable informational and encouraging posters on physical activity and nutrition and those are highlighted on the next slide.

So, the next slide talks - there's some samples of the Eat Smart Move More posters. Those are downloadable. They're colorful and you could do that today and hang a few up in your office.

The next resource is focusing more on Environmental Health. It's called Earth 911 and it's – a Website that is considered the nation's premiere environmental resource. What I thought was neat about this one is it talks about how to Go Green at home, but it also talks about recycling. And I think sometimes we don't always think of recycling as help but it really is. So you could access that Website for some great tips.

And the last Website is the Division of Occupational Health and Safety Ergonomics at Work program. So some people might be wondering, what exactly ergonomics is but really, what it is, is it's involving how to manipulate an individual's work area so that it fits better for them individually. So you can work in neutral postures, maintain your curve and be sitting up straight at your desk without feeling like its awkward and uncomfortable.

So this Website helps with some of the ergonomic aspects of your office area. It provides stretches and exercises that you can do in an office work environment, talks about how to – or support your healthy back and there's a lot of other online resources.

I kind of feel like I just ran through all of those, but those are Websites that are available. You also have another handout titled Online Wellness Resources. You might just look at one of those that are online and available to you.

But at this point, I'd like to open the phone line up for any comments and questions that the group might have.

Coordinator:

Certainly. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, 1 on your touch tone phone. You will be prompted to record your name. And to withdraw your request, star, 2. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, 1. One moment please for the first question.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, 1. Our first question today is from (Irani Brown).

Coordinator:

Our next question is from (Vanessa Thompson).

(Vanessa Thompson):

Yes, this is (Vanessa Thompson) from Head Start of Lane County. And I was wondering how this program relates to I'm Moving, I'm Learning, the children's program. Are they going to do them together

Allison Hertel:

That's a great question. Really, what this information – about – is about, is just a bunch of resources and ideas on how to integrate and implement staff wellness. So those programs that are on the call that are a part of I Am Moving, I Am Learning, I think that all of the activities and the information y you received at that training, if you implement that, you are doing something for staff wellness because it has to do with healthy meetings and getting kids moving in the program and that's going to take getting staff moving also.

(Vanessa Thompson):

Thank you.

Allison Hertel:

You're welcome.

Coordinator:

And once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, 1. One moment please for the next question.

Allison Hertel:

If people also have ideas on how to – how you're doing staff wellness or things that you've done during your staff meetings, please feel free to share that also.

Coordinator:

I have no further questions at this time.

Allison Hertel:

Okay. Well thank you. If there are no further questions or comments, I'll go ahead and conclude the call. If things come up after the call, please feel free to call or email me but thank you so much for participating in today's call. Hopefully you've gained a few new ideas on how you can do staff health and wellness activities in your program. And my challenge to you today is to – once we get off the phone – is to make two changes – one for you and one for your work environment. Thank you and everyone have a great afternoon.

END

Posted on 2/29/2008.