Healthy Lifestyles

According to a 2005 health report from the National Center for Health Statistics, half of Americans in their “Baby Boomer” years have high blood pressure, and 40% are obese. Milner-Fenwick's Healthy Lifestyle Changes Series helps your boomer patients look at their own nutrition and weight management choices to motivate them to make gradual changes for a healthy, permanent lifestyle.

The first video in the series, How to Make Healthy Lifestyle Changes provides behavioral management tips examining their own reasons for wanting to change, keeping written records, individual goal-setting, and identifying and overcoming obstacles in their way. 

For patients needing nutritional guidance in order to change their eating habits permanently, Nutrition: Eating for Health is for them.  It demonstrates the new food pyramid, and emphasizes the roles of grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, and meats in a healthy diet.  Strategies on choosing healthy fats and carbs, and managing portion size are included.

Exercise: Getting Active, Staying Active is for your patients who aren't likely to spend hours in the gym, but still need to learn skills for adding activity into their daily lives. This video covers aerobic activity, strength-training, and flexibility training. It discusses common barriers to exercising, stressing that adding a little more activity into one's day can result in big health benefits. 

The foundations of weight loss and the health benefits of gradual weight loss are the key messages in Weight Control: Losing Weight and Keeping it Off.  Eating for emotional reasons is discussed along with other factors that commonly affect weight, such as what we eat, the amount of food we eat, and how active we are.  This program emphasizes that lifestyle change, as opposed to dieting, is the key to weight control.

If you want to explain the new USDA food pyramid to your patients, The Food Pyramid (My Pyramid) is an excellent nutrition tool. It features many examples of each of the food groups throughout and suggests that viewers ask themselves, “Is there a healthier choice?”

Your Nutrition Style: Making the Pyramid Personal, produced by Learning Seed, focuses on four young adults and their efforts to adjust their eating habits. The video stresses that eating patterns have to fit individual needs rather than one size fits all.

Children's Nutrition

Three new programs from Injoy Video Productions have been added to our library. Each program examines the key nutritional issues for a specific phase of development.

Feeding Your Baby, Birth to One Year; teaches parents about age-appropriate food choices for babies, and the importance of positive, nurturing eating experiences. It covers breastfeeding and formula feeding, hunger cues, the introducing solid foods, choking, allergies, as well as self-feeding and family meals.

Young Children Eating Right, 1 to 6 years talks about incorporating a variety of foods and snacks into a routine with regular meals, plus developing healthy eating habits and physical activity. It explains the new food pyramid, discusses age appropriate amounts of foods, and healthy fast food alternatives. Challenges in feeding a child this age, such as preventing choking, dealing with picky eaters, food conflicts and appropriate TV watching behavior are all covered.

Produced specifically for elementary school-aged children, Healthy Habits for Kids 7-12 is a fast-paced, fun, and highly visual video, sure to keep their attention.  Each section of the new food pyramid is explained, and the need to make healthy food and activity choices are illustrated.  Simple language, colorful animation, and sound effects will keep their attention on this video! 

Heart Disease

High Cholesterol, An Introduction to Treatment has been revised to include the New Food Pyramid. Like the original, it covers both lifestyle changes and medications.  This  second edition includes what your patients need to know about fats, triglycerides, transfats, low fat substitutes, fiber, how to make healthier food choices and how to prepare foods. It also discusses quitting smoking, losing weight and increasing physical activity.

Stroke is the most common sudden injury to the brain and the third leading cause of death in the United States. Brain Attack, acquired from Intelecom, teaches your patients the factors that can cause strokes and the symptoms people need to be recognize. The rehabilitation stories of a pregnant woman and a seemingly healthy, middle-age man are followed.

Taking Cardiac Discharge Education "From Hospital to Home"

Have you felt that your best efforts to provide discharge education is lost on patients who feel overwhelmed and eager to return home? Here's some help. To compliment your goals, send an appropriate “From Hospital to Home” video home with your patients, and encourage them to watch it with their family and caregivers. 

Heart Surgery: Beginning Your Recovery, and Heart Failure: Basics for Better Care give your patients crucial self-care management skills to enhance their recovery specifically between the time they leave your facility and their first follow-up appointment.  These videos illustrate common activity and dietary guidelines, and teach patients the signs and symptoms to look for during their recovery. Medication compliance and the importance of the follow-up appointment with their health care provider are explained.  At $3.95 per video (100 unit order), videos in this series efficiently and cost-effectively enhance your JCAHO education activities and help reduce readmissions. Contact your Milner-Fenwick sales representative for a free preview.

Children and Obesity

The need to make lifestyle changes for proper weight management is by no means exclusive to adults. The CDC reports that the percentage of overweight young people has more than tripled since 1980.  Young and Overweight: Helping Yourself Change teaches kids strategies to making healthy choices  for a lifetime of proper weight management.  In its companion program, Guiding Your Overweight Child: Getting Healthy Together, parents learn tips to help all family members make healthy choices for themselves and their children through calorie counting and physical activity. 

Diabetes Audio

Milner-Fenwick has released its first audio program, The Diabetes Home Audio Guide: Skills for Self -Care. This two-hour program was developed for visually impaired or blind patients since the leading cause of adult blindness in the US is diabetes.

Lois Williams of the National Federation of the Blind of Alabama sees this as a very timely educational resource. "My concern when you lose your vision because of diabetes is that there's nothing available."

"Having people read to you and going to seminars is OK, but people can't remember everything. It's important to have a resource you can refer to when you're ready."  She explains, "Many blind people with diabetes give up because they don't have the information they need to take care of themselves. With diabetes, you're going to suffer and die sooner if you're ignorant."

This is also an excellent resource for people who like to learn when doing other activities such as when they are in the car or walking. It's available in audiocassette and CD-ROM formats and is only $17.95 per copy (discounted in quantity).

Domestic Violence 

In 2004, JCAHO added a new standard for hospitals on how to respond to domestic abuse and neglect (Standard PC.3.10 on Victims of Abuse).  This is timely since the U.S. Department of Justice reports that over 34% of women seeking care in the emergency room for violence-related injuries were injured by a spouse or boyfriend.  Too often their injuries are overlooked.

We've added When Injuries Speak, Who Will Listen?  A Healthcare Response to Domestic Violence to our catalog as an important resource to teach your staff how to identify and respond to domestic abuse.  This important program illustrates the challenges that your staff faces in dealing with patients who present signs of abuse, those who are reluctant to discuss it, and offers solutions in providing proper care, counseling and support.  It was produced by Intermedia, featuring renowned experts from Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and Providence Hospital in Washington, DC. 

Preview On-line!

Most of our videos can now be previewed over the Internet, right from your computer 24/7!  To learn more, and to see if your desired title can be previewed on-line, click Preview On-line Today on our home page. If you see a Play button, the program is streamable.   You'll need Internet Explorer after registering on-line to access this feature.

For any of these programs, contact your sales representative at (800) 432-8433 or go to milner-fenwick.com for more information.