Healthy Heart Healthy Family Thesis

Healthy Heart, Healthy Family

The National Institutes of Health published a community health worker’s manual for the Filipino community entitled “Healthy Heart, Healthy Family” in September of 2008 (originally printed in 1999). The manual was created to provide culturally relevant teaching tool that community health care workers throughout the United States can use to educate Filipino members of their community on practical lifestyle changes that will improve their health and help fight heart disease. The educational program spans eleven two hour sessions. The main components of the program are not culture specific however, each session starts with a Filipino folk saying that corresponds to the lesson, and ends with a culture specific example story of Lola de la Cruz and her family that reinforces the days lessons. All of the lessons have handout materials both in English and Ilocano.

The training program starts with a group introduction, and lesson about how the

Being that Filipinos are predominantly Catholic, and known to congregate into communities the first focus of the Filipino Blue Zone would be church groups. Filipinos already devoting some of their time to religion would likely be willing to attend one or more Blue Zones classes through their church. The second and larger focus would be to large employers of Filipinos like health care facilities, and in Hawaii, Landscaping companies. Employers benefit greatly from healthier employees through more productive workers, less absenteeism, and potential for greatly reduced health care costs. Additionally, by focusing on employers, and church groups we are targeting many people who are currently healthy which will give us a much greater level of influence than if the program only targeted those who are ill, or already have a disease (Clarke, et al.,