CHEC Yourself

This is Fatherhood

Join Michael Finlay as he covers the challenges and rewards of fatherhood. Michael is a trained parenting education facilitator for Boot Camp for New Dads, Mind in the Making, The Incredible Years, and READY! for Kindergarten. He is also a Blogger for the Marion & Polk Early Learning Hub.  In 2017 He formed This is Fatherhood LLC as a consulting enterprise providing parenting education to the community.  In 2019 he earned Parenting Educator 1 Status through the OPEC Recognition System and was also recognized as a Top 100 Father Blog by Feedspot.

Liberty House

In today's episode, we speak with Kelley Parosa - program director at Liberty House. Liberty House is a child abuse assessment center serving Marion and Polk counties. Liberty House offers a safe, comfortable, child-friendly environment for children and their families facing concerns of abuse, neglect, trauma, or grief. Their experienced staff members know how to help children and teens, and can provide support so children and their family members can get the help they need with fewer appointments and more coordination. 

Resilience

In today's episode, Becky Ruppert speaks about resiliency. She talks about what resiliency is. Becky has a master's degree in both psychology as well as community health. She is also a registered nurse. In our conversation, she pulls from the knowledge of all three of her areas of expertise and offers us specific tools on how to cultivate more resiliency (many of which are based in the realm of positive psychology). 

A Study on Happiness

Frieda Ryan-Anzur is a registered nurse and nurse manager at Salem Health Hospital. After completing Shawn Achor's book "The Happiness Advantage" at a hospital book club, she and her colleagues got together to formally test out whether his simple positive psychology tools can, in fact, make a difference even amidst those who are on the front lines of a pandemic.

A Stroke of Insight

In today's episode, we meet Sarah Daniels. Sarah occupies the role of Stroke Navigator at Salem Health Hospital. When she is not busy tweaking workflows at the hospital to improve outcomes for those who fall prey to a stroke, she is educating the public on how to prevent a stroke, what to do when you think you may be having one, and how to recover most effectively after the fact. She has a wealth of knowledge and a clear mission to help not only her patients, but her colleagues as well. 

Sleep: The Final Frontier

Dr. Thye Schuyler is a board-certified neurologist and sleep specialist. He is the Medical Director of the Salem Hospital Sleep Center, specializing in the treatment of all sleep disorders for adults and children.

Topics covered include: sleep hygiene, sleep apnea, the importance of sleep for health, how to improve our chances of getting good sleep, and how to manage ourselves (and reduce anxiety) when sleep doesn't come. 

What Dr. Schuyler reveals to us (beyond the logistics of it) is the mystery of it. Sleep, it turns out, is a very personal experience. No two people have exactly the same challenges even when they have the same "condition." The treatment is often equally individualized. In many ways, to work on our sleep is to work on aspects of ourselves.

Putting the Fun in Functional Fitness

Discussions about exercise almost always center, specifically, on "fitness"...as in "how much weight can you lift?" or "How much weight have you lost?" or "How fast can you run?" While there is nothing wrong with having concrete fitness goals, in this conversation, certified physical trainer Erin Clubb goes deeper. She speaks about her own health journey. She talks about how movement is an integral part of our lives, and she emphasizes the importance of creating a practice and style of movement that allows us to maximize all that we want to do more of. Instead of making exercise an opportunity to shame ourselves, she discusses the value in simply setting goals that are in alignment with what is important to us as individuals. In short, she has a philosophy of putting the "fun" in "functional fitness."

Holistic Weight Management

Come meet Andrea Shoun (a fellow health educator at the CHEC). 

In this episode, we talk about:

• The idea of starting fresh in a New Year.
• The benefits of creating intentions and resolutions (regardless of what time during the year).
• The importance of stress management.
• We speak a little to the concept of high sensitivity - a topic we will be doing a deep dive into in a later episode. 

The bulk of our time, though, is spent on the topic of Weight Management. We cover the controversy around weight as it relates to health (and the variety of viewpoints that exist in the health arena). We talk about what it looks like to stand at the intersection of loving your body as it is…while still engaging in behaviors that are associated with weight management. And we grapple with the challenge of holding a space for the fact that while weight loss does appear to yield tangible benefits for health…it’s not as simple as perhaps we have been made to believe it is.

The "How" of Success

We all know what it feels like to set up a goal and throw ourselves at its completion. For some reason, though, we often find ourselves falling short of our original vision. In today's episode, Leah Burkhart meets with Alyssa Gaiser to discuss her not-so-linear journey to the field of Health Education. She also speaks to the ingredients required to successfully meet the goals (be they professional or health-related) we put in motion.

The Story of the CHEC

Welcome to the very first episode of CHEC Yourself - a collaborative podcast aimed at helping listeners create their best lives and brought to you by the Community Health Education Center (hence the name "CHEC") at Salem Health Hospital in Salem Oregon. Join Leah Burkhart and Nancy Baldwin as Nancy describes her personal journey as a health educator and the pivotal roll she played in the CHEC's formation.