Healthy Communities in Fulton County, Illinois

The Healthy Communities in Fulton County, Illinois (HCFCI) project was a collaborative project with one primary goal: To improve access to health information in Fulton County, Illinois to enable the public to make informed decisions about their health.  The project had 4 objectives designed to help us reach this goal:

1) Provide instruction about the NLM, its programs, and its information resources to public librarians and library staff.

2) Provide information about NLM and NIH programs and information resources to the public.

3) Provide targeted health information, blood pressure checks, and BMI calculations to the public.

4) Help public libraries become a hub for reliable health information and be recognized as such by their communities.

In order to meet these objectives, the team which consisted of librarians, nursing faculty and nursing students held health fairs at public libraries in Fulton County.  At each health fair, nursing students talked to attendees about topics related to heart disease, which was identified as the number 1 health issue in the county by the health department.  The nursing students also asked attendees to play a health literacy game, have their blood pressure taken, and have their BMI calculated.  Librarians showed attendees NLM/NIH information resources and were available to help answer questions and give demos.  Attendees were given cards with their readings and health information, brochures/bookmarks about Medline Plus, All of Us, and other NIH information sources, and stickers from the Libraries Transform initiative. 

During each health fair, a health sciences librarian met with public library staff to provide more in-depth training on searching for health information using NLM/NIH resources and to discuss the benefits of becoming a member of their NNLM Region.  During this training each library received a health literacy kit that included NLM/NIH materials to give to their community and consumer health books for their collection.

Materials from this project are being shared as an open educational resource (OER).

Except as noted below, this work is available under CC BY-NC [Attribution-NonCommercial].

• Copyright for all logos is retained by the owning institutions.
• Copyright for all 'Libraries Transform' materials is retained by the American Library Association.  Please see their website for details about using materials (http://www.ilovelibraries.org/librariestransform/).
• 'What did my doctor say?' content is based on the work of the Medical Library Association and the Working Group for Health Literacy of the Massachusetts Health Sciences Library Network (MAHSLIN).  Please see the MLA website for details (https://www.mlanet.org/page/what-did-my-doctor-say).
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Preferred Attribution Statement: Healthy Communities in Fulton County, Illinois [insert item title] by the University of Illinois Chicago's Library of the Health Sciences-Peoria and Western Illinois University's School of Nursing is used under a CC BY-NC license.

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A University of Illinois at Chicago and Western Illinois University collaboration.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Grant Number 1UG4LM012346 with the University of Iowa.

Banner images courtesy of Pixabay and used under the Pixabay license.