Local Physician Uses Community Newspaper as a Voice for Resources

The other thing that’s a new initiative here, if I may, is that one of our physicians has started writing articles for the newspaper to kind of reach out to the public to get them more personally involved, and let them know what the resources are in the community. So her last series of articles – which ran one week apart, even two weeks apart – was an actual case study, with the permission of the family, of someone with early signs of dementia that developed into an Alzheimer’s type scenario and what community resources were tapped into for that person. So it was written in that way, so that people could read it and go, “Oh, I didn’t know we had Valley Community Services. I didn’t know we had that.” And so it was written so the reader would be, like, the first person. In lay terms. And they were very interesting articles. You know, the symptoms, how that changed, and they came back to their family doctor and the family doctor recommended they go to seek out these community things. And I think that’s a real positive reach out that started from the physician who came through me and said “How can we make this work?” And I just connected the dots between the newspaper and then the articles were published.