health

Western Kentucky University is hosting its first Refugee Health Summit on Thursday, April 18. Assistant Professor in WKU’s Department of Public Health Michelle Reece is coordinator of the summit. Reece came to the WKU Public Radio studio and spoke with reporter Rhonda Miller about this new project. 

Reece: My colleague and I, Dr. William Mkanta, we have some connection with the International Center of Kentucky here in Bowling Green. And over the course of the years we discovered that there are some issues that providers are facing as they’re interacting with our new residents, who are former refugees. And so we, through the Research and Creativities Program here at WKU, applied for a grant to look at “Provider Needs Assessment in Refugee Health Services.”  This summit is partly a response to the findings from our study, the ethical thing that we need to do and go back to the community and provide the results and how we’re going to address some of the issues that came up in refugee health services.

An Owensboro nonprofit that serves people with developmental disabilities is suspending its autism program. The CEO says the autism program will undergo a major restructuring to better serve its clients, who are students in elementary, middle and high school. 

Wendell Foster is a nonprofit that’s been serving people with disabilities for 72 years. The autism program began as a satellite location for the Kelly Autism Program at Western Kentucky University, but eventually the Owensboro program became independent.

The current autism program in Owensboro has been offered as an afterschool program a few hours a week, which has an average of 15-20 students, and a summer camp three days a week, which usually has about 30 students.

Doctors aren’t the only ones on call at Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown.  So is man’s best friend.

A part Labrador Retriever named Baron; Pepper the Yorkie; Lola, a Rhodesian Ridgeback; and Lady, a German Short-Haired Pointer, reported for duty at the hospital on a recent Friday afternoon, and fanned out to patient rooms to offer some canine comfort. 

A growing number of milk depots are cropping up in Kentucky as a way to provide more newborns with breastmilk.

The state is now home to eight locations where human breastmilk can be donated, screened, and distributed to fill the void for infants in need.

Rachel Garrison, a lactation consultant with the milk depot at The Medical Center at Bowling Green, said human breast milk can be lifesaving for infants who are premature or ill.

Bowling Green resident Carl Coffey has lived with a speech disorder that affects an estimated 3 million Americans: stuttering.

But he said people are often surprised to learn he’s been impacted by the disorder.

“And to some people who might be listening, they might say, “Oh, I don’t hear you stutter.’ I’m what most people would classify as a ‘covert stutterer’, or have been for most of my life.”

Coffey is head of the Bowling Green chapter of the National Stuttering Associaton. The group meets on the third Thursday of every month in room 118 of the Academic Complex at WKU from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.

Sue Meeks has worked with children for years as a registered nurse.

Meeks manages the family navigator program at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens, Ohio.

Several years ago, she started noticing three and four-year-olds coming into the program with certain distinctive behaviors.

“Children that appear to be neurologically very overstimulated,” she said. “They often aren’t social in your typical way. They don’t respond to trying to calm them or trying to divert their attention to something else, laughing with them, or getting a response from reading.”

A number of towns and counties in our region have adopted needle exchange programs in recent years as a way to combat rising levels of H.I.V and hepatitis C.

Barren County, Kentucky, began its needle exchange program in March, and has so far received more than 1,300 dirty needles from intravenous drug users.

Stephanie Dickerson has seen the Barren County needle exchange progress from being an idea met with skepticism to a reality. She works in health education at the Barren River District Health Department, and is based in Barren County. She helped the department’s director and epidemiologist lobby Barren County and Glasgow city governments to approve a needle exchange.