NC SPIN and coalition launch "A Healthier NC" campaign and challenge.
Published April 18, 2013
In March of last year, NC SPIN hosted a day-long forum on healthcare. More than a dozen experts in our state spoke to the unsustainability of our current healthcare system, pointed out that North Carolina consistently ranks in the bottom third of states in health outcomes, agreed that we could not wait for solutions from Washington or any particular group and talked about what we in North Carolina could do to bring down health costs and improve our health outcomes. All agreed we didn’t need to let this discussion stop with this forum.
For the past year we have assembled a steering committee, talked with people from every sector in healthcare and today announce an exciting statewide health and education campaign called, A Healthier NC. It is similar to a statewide campaign started by former Governor J. Melville Broughton in the 1940’s, called the Good Health Plan.
Click here to see WRAL Video Footage of 4/18/13 A Healthier NC Press Conference
The input we received led to four primary goals for this campaign:
- To educate people on what healthy means…an understanding of how high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity cause many of us to be unhealthy.
- To encourage each person in our state to understand their personal responsibility in improving their own health…better eating, more activity, losing weight.
- To promote a greater understanding of smarter access to healthcare…why establishing a relationship with a personal care physician is preferable to visiting the emergency department.
- To issue a challenge to our people to become A Healthier NC. We want to engage 1 million people in 15 million hours of activity and to lose 10 million pounds.
To facilitate the A Healthier NC Challenge, NC SPIN along with partners including The North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians, The North Carolina Medical Society, North Carolina Office of Rural Health and Community Care, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, and AARP's Decide. Create. Share. Campaign, launched the campaigns website AHealthierNC.com.
A Healthier NC.com provides FREE health journaling tools that allow each of us to set a goal weight, journal the foods we eat, log our physical activities and track our personal and collective progress toward improved health.
Those who join the Challenge, don’t have to take the journey alone… A Healthier NC.com enables us to Get Healthy Together!
Businesses, Faith Groups, Schools and community organizations can form their own online group with a personalized A Healthier NC Group Page. Groups can set goals, internally message members and run reports for measurement.
Now businesses of any size can launch workplace wellness programs at no cost. Schools can use these tools to complement existing programs and report outcomes. And Churches and Faith Groups can work together to improve congregational health.
We invite you, the loyal viewers of NC SPIN and North Carolina's leaders, to join A Healthier NC with your co-workers, members of your congregation, neighbors and friends, to get healthy together.
North Carolina has a rich history of firsts—we were first in flight and first in freedom—there’s no reason we can't be first in population health!
Registration is easy and FREE at AHealthierNC.com. Please join us!
April 21, 2013 at 3:36 pm
Jonathan Kotch says:
All of the four goals articulated by the Steering Committee are laudable but not likely to make a dent in NC's woeful health status, which is more a consequence of poor living standards (poor wages, poor housing, poor nutrition, poor public education, poor protection from injuries, violence, and environmental hazards) than they are the result of lack of "personal responsibility" (a right wing calumny if ever I heard one). To be first in population health, health risks must be addressed at the population level, not the personal level.
