LifeBridge Health/American Heart Association Partnership Seeks to Bring Healthy Eating Lessons to Communities
A new focus of the longstanding partnership between LifeBridge Health (LBH) and the American Heart Association (AHA) is teaching LBH staff easy-to-learn healthy cooking methods they can impart to their patients and clients, as well as community members and even their own families.
Instructors with the AHA's "Simple Cooking with Heart" program recently came to Sinai Hospital of Baltimore to present to LifeBridge Health employees and community members a hands-on cooking demonstration of how to whip up healthy meal
s using basic ingredients and cooking tools - and how to use the AHA curriculum to lead their own demonstrations. This training was intended to launch a series of future cooking lessons for patients as part of a larger initiative to "bring healthier eating to our community and patient population," said Lane Levine, population health project manager at LifeBridge Health.
"Having staff trained to teach healthy cooking lessons means that nutrition education can be a part of any interaction between providers and patients," Levine explained.
The "Simple Cooking with Heart" program-through cooking lessons, the dissemination of nutritious recipes and money-saving shopping tips, and a curriculum from which staff can teach patients-seeks to raise awareness of the health and economic benefits of avoiding fast food restaurants and making meals at home. One of the main goals of the program is to help increase the amount of fruits, vegetables, fish and whole grains consumed by Americans.
Tracy Brazelton, executive director of the AHA of the Mid-Atlantic region added, "I think this is a great example of LifeBridge Health and the American Heart Association's collective impact. Through this initiative, we can engage employees and send more trainers, more advocates, out into the community."
LifeBridge Health and the AHA have also partnered to distribute free CPR kits and train hundreds of community members to perform CPR.