Speakers, IU deans to discuss health strategies at conference

On Wednesday, IU will hold its third Conference on Healthy Living, which will be open to the public at the Indiana Government Conference Center South auditorium in Indianapolis. \nThe conference will last the entire day and will include a variety of speakers who will discuss different strategies to live healthier. \nA panel of deans from IU Bloomington and IU-Purdue University at Indianapolis will answer questions at the event.\nSchool of Nursing Dean Marion Broome, one of the deans on the panel, said the conference will provide people with the knowledge and skills they need to live a healthy lifestyle. She said speakers will give “excellent strategies that we can implement in our every day life.” Each speaker will give a speech about a different strategy. \nJayme Little, a member of the IU Alumni Association and a coordinator for the conference, said the speeches will help bring the audience additional information about cancer, healthy hearts and more. The event will include a future health forecast for the state of Indiana, he said. Little said the alumni population based in central Indiana is a large target audience for the conference. \nKaren Jones, another coordinator and member of the IU Alumni Association, said the event planning starts in early summer when the Alumni Association sits down with all the different schools and discusses different dates. The association then attempts to coordinate this date with the Indiana State Department of Health. By early fall, topics are discussed, she said. By late October, the plans are finalized, she said \nBroome said another target audience is college students. She said if students can get into a healthy routine in college it is easier to continue that routine throughout their lives. She said two important aspects of college students’ health are that they are busy and that they eat very different foods on campus than they do at home. However, she said the main issue is that college students are busy, so it is harder for them to find time to exercise. \nBroome also said a big problem is that the country does not pay for prevention against illnesses. The country will pay for medication after people are diagnosed with an illness, but it will not pay for the medication to prevent that illness, she said. An example of this, she said, is when women are not reimbursed for receiving a second mammogram. \n“It’s time for people to assume responsibility for their own health,” Broome said.