When you are walking through a grocery store, have you ever stopped to wonder why there are so many cereal boxes advertising for heart health? According to Emory University, approximately 550,000 people are diagnosed with heart failure each year! That is a lot of people who are affected by this diagnosis; this does not account for the people who have had a stroke or a heart attack. Many of these people have to go to rehab facilities, like The Cedars, in order to better take care of themselves.

To help address this issue, The Cedars has introduced the CHF Program involving interactive weekly classes in the Rehabilitation Conference Room. These classes help educate our patients with heart problems, and their families.  This program started a year ago when Hannah Temple, Nurse Manager on Black Wolf, thought there should be more formal education about Congestive Heart Failure and how to live with it. Many patients would go through rehab and still wouldn’t understand how to properly take care of themselves to stay out of the hospital when they went home. “We should be educating our patients so we can hold them accountable for taking care of themselves… If we don’t then that’s when we have truly failed to care for them.” It was with this initiative and forethought that pushed Hannah and The Cedars to dive into this education program.

Educating our patients to stay healthy after their transition home:

• Healthy eating to reduce sodium intake
• Maintain a steady weight
• Mindfulness of fluid intake
• Increased self-awareness to listen to their bodies
• Know when to seek medical help

Although these cereal boxes try to educate us, they lack depth of information needed for people suffering with heart failure. Thankfully, The Cedars is giving our patients the tools to keep them on the road to recovery, long after they transition home. For more information on The Cedars Rehab, call 207-221-7000.