American Heart Month: Finding the Pulse for Change

Written by?Maria Samot , Senior Vice President, Content Development, Relias

In February, Valentine’s Day is the first thing that comes to mind when we spot red hearts displayed here and there. But for many people working in healthcare, those hearts represent American Heart Month — an annual effort to raise awareness of heart disease in the U.S. since 1964.?

Mission-Driven Partners

During #HeartMonth, we celebrate the incredible work of Relias’ long-time partner, the American Heart Association ?(AHA). The AHA is one of the oldest and largest nonprofits focused on heart disease and stroke — respectively, the No. 1 and 2 killers worldwide.

As a leading provider of continuing education, Relias is proud to offer select, online accredited courses from AHA, including HeartSaver? First Aid and HeartCode? Life Support content. From First Aid CPR AED to Pediatric and Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support, these courses have tallied thousands of completions on our platform .

Beyond courses, we proudly support the mission and programs of the AHA, which align so closely with our own of improving lives. Relias kicks off the month by participating in National Wear Red Day? . This event encourages individuals to wear red to raise awareness of the impact on women, where one in three women are diagnosed with heart disease annually.

Heart of the Triangle: Supporting Our Community

This year, we were excited to sponsor our local AHA’s Adopt-A-Clinic. Lincoln Community Health Center (LCHC) is a federally qualified health center that serves 30,000 uninsured, high-risk patients in Durham, NC. Many of its patients have uncontrolled hypertension and are unable to afford their own blood pressure monitors to manage their health.?

Hypertension often has no obvious symptoms, which is why it’s called the “silent killer.” Almost half of all adults in the Triangle are living with hypertension, so blood pressure self-monitoring is critical to prevent poor health outcomes.

Our sponsorship has enabled the American Heart Association to provide Lincoln Community Health Center with blood pressure cuffs.

Photo: Dr. Holly Biola and team from Lincoln Community Health Center with the blood pressure cuffs they requested for their patients.

Finally, I’m honored to represent Relias on the Executive Leadership Team for The Heart of the Triangle’s 2022 Triangle Heart Ball ! The Heart of the Triangle takes the campaign beyond the ballroom and onto the block, bringing the work of the American Heart Association to life and culminating at the Heart Ball celebration.

The AHA and its supporters, including Relias, are relentlessly focused on standing for all by driving equitable health for every member of our community. We are striving?to help all members of society have an equal chance of living a healthier, longer life — no matter their ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, or education level.

From reducing blood pressure and ending tobacco and vaping use, to investing in COVID research and resources, to ensuring everyone has access to healthy foods, the AHA is working to improve and save lives every day.

What drives this focus and passion? Consider these unsettling data points:

• Uncontrolled high blood pressure is a silent killer that causes unnecessary and inequitable disease and death. Nearly half of U.S. adults have high blood pressure, and many aren’t even aware. Black Americans are 40% more likely to have high blood pressure, 10% less likely to have it under control, and three times as likely to die from heart disease caused by hypertension as Caucasians.
• In urban communities, people living just five miles apart can, in some cases, have a difference in life expectancy of more than 20 years due to economic stability, education, societal influences and health care access. Additionally, rural areas have higher death rates for cardiovascular disease and stroke than urban areas. Hispanics and Black Americans are most likely to stay home if experiencing medical emergencies, like a heart attack or a stroke, to avoid the risk of contracting COVID-19 at the hospital. These communities are dying of COVID-19 at disproportionately high rates, as they’re more likely to have underlying health conditions, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
• Non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic youth have the highest amount of menthol use among youth smokers. Additionally, tobacco retailers are concentrated in low-income areas — nearly five times more tobacco retailers per square mile in the lowest income neighborhoods than the highest-income ones.
• People living in lower income areas have significantly higher rates of unhealthy diets. For many, the only sources of food in their neighborhood are either from fast food locations or prepackaged items from convenience stores.

The Heart of the Triangle campaign focuses on the mission-critical work being done within our community by putting a spotlight on opportunities to save and improve lives by creating meaningful change. It means educating families in our community on the importance of living healthier lives. It means fighting to ensure that our communities have the highest quality and most equitable care. And it means persistently working toward finding cures for heart disease and stroke. We will do all of this so that more people in our community can experience life’s best moments together.

Advancing Health Equity Together

We’re grateful for the opportunity and to all our Relians for choosing to help ensure that the AHA can continue to fund cardiovascular research, support front line health care workers, and help those in our communities who are disproportionately impacted by coronavirus, heart disease, and stroke.

And we invite you to join us ! As a supporter, you can help make this lasting impact by funding the lifesaving work of the American Heart Association. It will provide critical resources to schools and companies working to improve health and well-being as they reopen.

Your support funds initiatives that address social inequities and barriers to health care that exist for African Americans and other people of color. And it will ensure that the work we do daily to improve hospital care, teach CPR, and fight for healthy policies will continue.

So today, WEAR RED, and consider joining Relias in supporting the American Heart Association to bring awareness and needed change in this critical area. Together, we can elevate care and advance health equity.