Submitted by students Allen Ha, P4 and Rowena Vilches-Tran, P3
Sixteen Oregon State University pharmacy students served more than 500 community members in the 2012 Chinese New Year Culture Fair Outreach. The Year of the Dragon was celebrated on Saturday, February 11, 2012 at the Oregon Convention Center.
The students hosted two large booths where they provided health care services including education on asthma & smoking cessation, heartburn and Mr.Yuk. Pharmacy students prepared Chinese translated brochures on AWARE, diabetes and hypertension. They also displayed their Mandarin and Cantonese language skills by conversing with attendees. Operation Diabetes conducted more than 130 blood glucose screenings in addition to 84 blood pressure screenings. AWARE had an opportunity to talk to more than 200 individuals about appropriate antibiotic use and proper hand washing techniques. AWARE targeted the general public, but the focus was on the pediatric population who they provided AWARE coloring books and crayons to. Adults received Chinese translated brochures. In addition to these translated brochures, a follow-up survey was conducted in attempt to improve the brochures for future outreach. Overall, the outreach was a tremendous success! We look forward having this becoming a yearly outreach event.
A special thank you to our volunteers: Petrus Oliphant, Keri Crumby, Whitney Woolstenhulme, Sz-chi Liang, Jena Jobin, Jeremy Dinh, Ian McClellan, Kristina Cobarrubias, Adam Furman, Yinxuan Zhang, Darlene Harschbarger, Kate Lewis, Mai-Hong Nguyen and Emily Yen. Thank you also to our preceptors for making this event possible: Dr. Chin, Dr. Duong, Dr. Kullar, Dr. Munar and Ms Peterson.
An additional thank you goes out to all of our suppliers for their generous donations: OSSP, Fred Meyer and Roche, Safeway, Pfizer, Dr. Natalea Braden-Suchy and the Diversity committee for the grant and Portland Chinese Times for hosting the event.