UA Researcher Hopes to Change Health Outcomes One Community at a Time

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — A University of Alabama researcher is encouraging communities to take responsibility for their own health — and she’s giving them the tools to do just that.

Dr. Debra Whisenant, assistant professor in UA’s Capstone College of Nursing, has received a one-year, $7,500 grant from the Southern Nurses Research Society to launch a health promotion program in multiple communities in Jefferson, Walker and Blount Counties.

The concept is simple. By working with faith-based and civic organizations, Whisenant and her team will train volunteers in these communities to provide basic health education to residents.

“It’s quite a simple model,” Whisenant said. “It doesn’t cost much money at all, but you’re empowering the community to take care of themselves, and they’re being taught these topics and being encouraged to participate in health by people just like them — people in their community, people they know, people they trust and people who can do it together.

“It’s a much more effective model than someone they don’t know coming in and teaching them for six months to a year and then disappearing. This way you’ve got longevity, sustainability and more participation.”

Whisenant’s team has surveyed several church congregations to determine what topics are of interest. The primary responses have been hypertension, diabetes and preventing cancer. There was also some interest from younger residents on preventing the spread of infectious diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases.

Weight loss and weight control will also be tied into every topic because those two things impact so many others, and there will be free exercise opportunities for the community, Whisenant said. A big factor in the program’s success is socialization. The more participants can work together, motivate each other and hold each other accountable, the greater the chances they succeed in their health goals, she added.

There will also be screenings to check for blood pressure and blood glucose levels. Grant funds will purchase blood pressure cuffs and glucometers to measure glucose levels. Whisenant said the goal is to help participants decrease systolic blood pressure by 10 points in a year and, if a participant is overweight, see a percentage of weight loss.

They will monitor the participants every three months to ensure participants are on track to reach their goals. Participants will also be surveyed every six months and, when new topics arise, the volunteer health educators will be trained to address those topics, as well.

“It might be a group of young women who want to learn more about breastfeeding, so we’ll find someone who’s an expert on that topic to come in and train the volunteers who will then pass on the info to the young women,” Whisenant said.

Whisenant said the grant money will also allow them to pull in student researchers who can help keep the program going long-term. Her goal is to develop something that will continue for 20 years or more.

“We’re changing the culture, which is a huge undertaking, but if we can start in one small community and change that culture, that’s something,” she said.

This area of research has long been an interest of Whisenant, whose background is in critical care and organ donation. During her five years working at the organ center, she saw a major shift in the type of donors.

Before helmet and seat belts laws came into play, the typical donor was a teenage boy who was participating in a type of high-risk behavior, such as speeding or riding a motorcycle, she said. But since implementation of those laws, the number of teen deaths decreased.

The new typical donor became a “40-something,” with a history of hypertension, obesity or other chronic disease that could have been prevented.

When she moved into the education arena, Whisenant started looking at health promotion and disease prevention in international communities, both rural and indigent. She began in Haiti and also assessed health education needs in Jamaica.

She launched a health education campaign to determine what the communities knew and what they wanted to know, and how she could help provide that information. After seeing positive results, Whisenant’s attention turned to home.

“I’m walking around here, and it’s the same type of problems, but we’re not really doing a lot with prevention in the states,” she said.

She launched a similar program at a church in Tennessee and in Alabama, all of which were “very” effective in terms of weight loss, motivation, personal responsibility, personal health and the health of families, Whisenant said. Some of those programs have been ongoing for almost four years.

“I don’t know if some things can be prevented or not, but we have to try,” she said. “If you have a program like this that costs little to nothing but it can improve people’s medical outcomes and quality of life, then why are we not doing that? You’re imploring the community to take care of themselves. They’re quite capable of doing just that.”