Vendors use health fair to spread the word

For the vendors at the East Adams Rural Healthcare health fair, they all had one simple but important objective in mind: get their information out and let people know that they exist.

About 30 vendors set up shop at the health fair on Saturday morning at the fairgrounds in Ritzville, meeting with a steady stream of attendees. Vendors included People for People, Aflac, East Adams Library District, Kaiser Permanente, Premera Blue Cross, Adams County Integrated Health Care Services, Costco, Informing Families, Washington State Patrol, Grand Columbia Health Alliance and, of course, EARH.

It was the first health fair at EARH for new CEO Corey Fedie, who thought the event went pretty well and was well attended. For EARH, he said, the goal of the health fair is to simply help in taking care of the community.

"This is an opportunity for us to engage with community and the vendors to engage with community and try to get out there to make sure people know what's going on in healthcare, if there's questions we can answer, services we can look at, all those kinds of things," Fedie told The Journal. "The vendors are here clearly to help support that and do the things that we don't."

One of the vendors on hand was People For People, a nonprofit organization in eastern Washington funded by WSDOT that provides employment and training services, special needs transportation, Non-Emergency Medical Transportation and senior nutrition, among other things.

At the health fair, the organization was promoting a newly offered transportation route between Ritzville and Othello. Route 103 is in service on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and can also connect people who want or need to go the Tri-Cities.

"It's such a rural area, there's not a lot of services here in Ritzville so we try to connect with as many outlying areas as we can," said the People For People representative at the health fair. "We're really excited about our Tri-Cities run, because it's so big and then they can connect with Three Rivers Transit [in Kennewick] and they can go anywhere."

Aflac, a nationwide health insurance company, was another one of the vendors on hand at the health fair. Aflac provides individual and group supplemental insurance in the case of unexpected accidents and illnesses.

Barrett Rossie, the Aflac representative at the health fair, explained that East Adams Rural Healthcare is a longtime Aflac customer, and has been since they were formerly known as East Adams Rural Hospital. Rossie said that Aflac and EARH had "lost touch" with each other for a little while and re-established their relationship earlier this year.

"I didn't know what to expect, and I just wanted to see what health resources are available down here and if any individual wanted to talk about Aflac, I'm here to talk," Rossie said.

East Adams Library District was also on hand to promote and raise awareness about their monthly Access Health program at the Ritzville Public Library that began earlier this year.

In May, EALD was selected as a recipient of the 'All of Us Health Literacy Outreach Award' from the Pacific Northwest Region of the National Networks of Libraries of Medicine. EALD was awarded with almost $19,000 to allow them to provide current and unbiased health information as well as access to services for the library's constituents.

One of the things that EALD did with the funds was create the "Access Health at East Adams" program, an event on the last Thursday of the month at the Ritzville Public Library that focuses on different health topics affecting the community.

September's event is focused on healthy aging and features a presentation from Dr. Kristina Bowen, MD, from MultiCare-Spokane. Bowen will talk about how healthcare needs change as individuals age and what they can do to extend the active years of their lives. This month's event is set for Sept. 26 at 6 p.m.

With the funds EALD received with the award, they have also worked on creating a "Health and Social Services" computer workstation that is dedicated to connecting users with health information websites. The computer should be arriving in the coming weeks.

"It's not going to be [a computer] where people can just sign on at anytime, it's going to be for [people] who go, 'oh crap, I need to do my open enrollment for my health insurance,' or 'I want to look up this certain health issue,'" said EALD Assistant Amy Hille at the health fair.

The workstation will also provide assistance with social services, such as helping people apply for temporary assistance or a housing stipend. Hille said they wanted to also focus on social services because not many of the state's social services travel into Ritzville anymore.

"We know that a lot of our community members that need those services also don't have internet connection," said Hille. "So it's providing a secure connection [to allow them to access those services.]"