Wellfie Wednesday Tip #140: Reflections from a Health Screening Event

Happy #WellfieWednesday! This week’s post is brought to you by Aaron Perez (@FreestylePhysio). Enjoy!

                  This past week I had the privilege of assisting at a health expo where Pro-Activity Tennessee, led by Alexis and Zac Morgan, conducted a health screening event and launched a year-long health and wellness initiative with a large employer. It was the largest and busiest health screening I had ever been a part of, and it was awesome! Given that I know most of our readers are PTs interested in health and wellness, I thought it may be useful and interesting to share a few takeaways from my experience. 

Importance of Planning 

I love that quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower, and feel it applies to my experience this past weekend well. I thought the team did an amazing job of preparing. Alexis put together an incredibly detailed, yet easy to follow master spreadsheet to keep us organized. We walked through the event virtually and then again when we all got together in person. I never felt overly anxious or panicked during the walkthroughs, and this may be because my role and responsibilities were small in comparison to others on the team, but nonetheless I think it speaks to how well prepared those leading the charge were. 

Look the Part 

The host company did an excellent job of branding their event and initiative. They created shirts for all of us to wear so that we could look like one team, even though the day of the event was the first time some of us had met in person. Further, even with it being the first health screening event for some of us in the group, I feel like we looked the part and had a great showcase, with eye catching handouts (kudos Alexis for being a design wizard), fun music (can’t go wrong with ACDC), and lots of equipment, including BP cuffs, hand grip dynamometers, body composition scales, assault bikes, and more. In fact, two of the biggest game changers in my opinion were not used in any part of the health screening, yet made the health screening a memorable event worth participating in and talking about. 

Building Comradery Through…Competition?

As hinted at above and in the main picture of this blog post, the Pro-Activity team utilized a “Live” scoring system that was continuously updated on a big screen TV as participants completed their screenings. This really seemed to add a “Wow” factor that not only brought people into the screening but also kept them around afterwards watching the leaderboard to see how their co-workers were doing. Not only was there a live leaderboard, but there was an awesome looking “WWE-esque” belt hanging over top of the leaderboard to be won by the overall champion of our screens. I found that addition to be powerful and it made it much simpler to persuade people to participate. I could simply say, “You want to participate in this because you want a chance at winning THAT!” **pointing to the belt hanging on top of the leaderboard*” Big shout out to Nick for creating the system that made the Live leaderboard possible, and to Zac for the championship belt. 

Energy is Contagious 

Lastly, I want to acknowledge the host company’s participants as I felt their energy throughout the event and even at the 6am workout the next day, it was tremendous! It made it much easier to stay excited during the event when I could feed off the participants energy. Health screenings can be difficult in that regard because they are by nature monotonous for the conductors. I’ve never had so much fun asking people what their age and height are for 3 hours straight 😊. Kudos to everyone involved, and I hope that same energy snowballs throughout the yearlong initiative.  

Thanks for all of the support, be sure to post your pictures this week and tag the WW crew members in your post (@TheFuelPhysio, @Eric_in_AmERICa, @FreestylePhysio, @DianaKlatt) and keep the wave of healthy change going!

- WW Crew