VCU students and faculty take part in Una Vida Sana Event

By Jennifer Terkeltaub
VCU Communications and Public Relations

Students and faculty from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy and Nursing along with language interpreter students helped to provide health screenings for Richmond’s Hispanic community during the Una Vida Sana event.

The event was a trial run of a program to promote health in the Hispanic community. The project is expected to grow over the next year into a service-learning initiative that provides screenings and health education on numerous topics. This year’s event included screenings for cardiometabolic diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes and heart disease.

Mark Ryan, M.D., of the VCU Department of Family Medicine, started the Una Vida Sana or “a healthy lifestyle” program with the goal of providing preventive health care to Spanish-speaking patients.

Ryan says he wanted to enable the Hispanic community to seek preventive care and check-ups to prevent patients from waiting for a condition to become chronic before they sought treatment. He also wanted to structure an outreach project in a way that it could serve as a service learning opportunity for students and faculty.

The program plans to develop a core working group and a method of organizing events so that many preventive health services can be provided to the Hispanic community.