Tuesday Checkup: New Year Resolutions Can Be Tough To Keep / WCPN.org

Tuesday Checkup: New Year Resolutions Can Be Tough To Keep

Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Topics: Health
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It's that time of year when smoking cessation hotlines tend to get busier and gyms get more crowded. New Year resolutions are easy to make but often tough to keep. Plain Dealer health reporter Kaye Spector has been looking into the issue about what it takes to turn a New Years resolution into a new lifestyle. She sat down with ideastream®'s Eric Wellman.

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Read Kaye Spector's Story in the Plain Dealer

via wcpn.org

Food inspection reports draw a lot of interest online

By Kaye Spector
Plain Dealer Health and Medical Writer

People with a hunger for information about their favorite eateries
flocked to the Cleveland Health Department’s online database of food
inspection reports after the site went live on Monday.

The database was so popular that users crashed the site shortly after 6
p.m., Director Matt Carroll said.

By midday Wednesday, more than 17,000 visitors had visited the site,
clevelandhealth.org. There were 52,647 page views of the inspection
reports, which are the department’s food safety assessment of
Cleveland restaurants, grocery stores and other food vendors.

Many spent 30 minutes looking over the pages.

Health officials are happy. One of their goals is to decrease the
number of foodborne illnesses by educating consumers about where they
are buying prepared food.

“I think it's a curiosity,” Carroll said. “But we hope it becomes
more in the vigilance category where people are choosing where to go
based on the food safety issues.”

That might encourage health officials' other aim: to increase food
vendors' motivation to comply with food safety laws.

Commissioner Willie Bess said he's already heard from one grocery store
owner without violations who called to ask what he needed to do to
maintain his high level of operation.

“That's good,” Bess said.

Some early visitors to the site found it difficult to navigate. The
Health Department tweaked the pages to eliminate a step.

Others complained that they couldn't find their favorite restaurant,
which Carroll said might be explained by two reasons: One, the
restaurant might have been inspected in the first half of 2009 and had
no violations. The other reason might be to search by a restaurant's
name you have to get it exactly right. For example, if you type Big Egg
(no “The”) in the name box, you won't be able to pull up a report
for the restaurant. The end-around is to search for the restaurant's
name in the text search box.

Dorothy Gaughan, 81, has never gotten sick from eating at a restaurant,
but she wants to know how her favorite eateries fared with the Health
Department.

“At our age, you get sick quick,” she said. “You have to be a
little more careful.”

The North Olmsted resident used to follow TV news reports about unsafe
restaurants but likes the ideas of having the information readily
available on the Internet.

“I'm anxious to get on there and check and see,” she said. “It'll
be really interesting to find out.”

Cleveland Health Dept. places inspection data online: Reports on restaurants, vendors available for free

By Kaye Spector

Plain Dealer Health and Medical Writer

Dining out in Cleveland can now include the kind of check that comes before a meal, not after.

That would be an examination of the restaurant’s food inspection report, now available online at clevelandhealth.org.

On Monday, the Cleveland Health Department posted its assessments of the city’s 3,000 restaurant and food vendors, all of which are inspected at least once a year. Anyone with a computer and Internet access can view the inspection reports, which date from mid-2009.

The reports always have been available to the public in paper form. But the health department only received about 100 requests from the general public to see the records each year, said Health Commissioner Willie Bess.

Health officials hope that the increased access to the reports will have two effects: decrease the number of foodborne illnesses by educating consumers about where they are buying prepared food; and increase food vendors’ motivation to comply with food safety laws.

“Most people don’t think about food safety until they get sick,” Bess said. “We hope people will experiment with it and see what they find.”

One important advantage the online database has over paper records is that it’s searchable.

You can look for reports by restaurant name. Or if you don’t know the full name, you can look by location. If, say, you’re worried about mice at your favorite fondue place, you can do a text search for “rodent.” Bothered by bugs you spotted at a place you ate on Superior Avenue? Search using the words “pests and superior.” The site has a feature to help users interpret the information.

Health officials caution that the inspection reports represent a “snapshot” of a food operation on a particular day. “It’s not a rating system,” said project director Pam Cross.

And there are different levels of violations. A citation for having broken ceiling tiles — which usually must be fixed within seven days — is not as serious as one for lacking a reliable source of power, water or sewer capability — which must be addressed immediately.

The online records contain the same information as the old paper records and include details of violations such as food handling, serving, preparation and storage. Violations can range from inadequate temperature control to improper labeling to cross-contamination of foods.

The reports also contain health inspectors’ comments about sanitation in the kitchens or stockrooms and follow-up data on whether a business addressed previous violations.

There are no plans now to upload older information, Health Director Matt Carroll said, but future inspection reports will be added as they are filed.

Carroll promised Monday to make the Web site easier to navigate after a few early visitors complained the database was hard to find on the health department Web site.

After clicking a link on the home page, viewers are taken to a page where they must click on another link. On the third page, which looks like it has nothing to do with inspection reports, viewers must click on the word “retrieve” at the upper left, under the CDPH logo.

Full-service restaurants in Cleveland are routinely inspected up to four times a year, Carroll said. Some businesses are inspected even more often if there are complaints, Carroll said.

“Our core role as a health department is food safety,” Carroll said. “Our prime goal is to keep food sold in the city safe.”

Depression: Exploring its reach

 

By Kaye Spector

Plain Dealer Health and Medical Reporter

Terri Miller, whose sister and daughter suffered from major depression, can pinpoint her lowest point as a caregiver.

One night, the North Olmsted resident sat on her couch, trying to comfort her suicidal daughter, the crying teenager's head in her lap. The phone rang: it was her sister, also voicing suicidal thoughts.

Two wrenching cries for help. One strained, emotionally stressed and ready-to-collapse person shouldering their pain.

Like many caregivers of people with depression, Miller suffered a high degree of unrelenting stress.

“You end up living and breathing the illness,” Miller says.

Miller's story has a happy ending, thanks to counseling, education, a support group and an understanding boss.

Her daughter, now 23, was able – with her mother's help – to manage her illness enough to graduate from high school and become a dental assistant. She is now working full-time, raising a toddler and is doing very well, Miller says.

But, like Miller, many caregivers of people with major depression struggle. Much of the strain comes from the depressed person becoming the main focus of the caregiver's life.

In addition to fatigue, the caregiver deals with sadness, guilt and anger, says Karan Osowski, a social worker with the Visiting Nurses Association. And there's burnout.

“It's hard on caregivers,” says Debbie Stambaugh, a mental health nurse with the Visiting Nurses Association. In particular, an elderly, nonmobile person with depression can be a drain on the caregiver.

“The caregiver really becomes their eyes and ears,” she says. “Depression can develop just in trying to manage chronic conditions.”

A recent Harris interactive poll for the National Alliance on Mental Illness showed that nearly half of caregivers who responded said they had been diagnosed with depression.

Miller is among that group. After going through a stressful episode with her sister or her daughter, she often would experience painful migraines, withdraw from social contact and become irritable, self-critical and overreacting, she says.

“Depression is always there and gets worse with stress,” Miller says.

Bridget Montana, chief operating officer for the Hospice of the Western Reserve and an advanced practice nurse, says in the last 18 months – perhaps because of the recession and increased demands in the workplace – she has seen an increasing number of caregivers who are stressed because they believe they can't get away from work to take care of family members.

“Then they feel they come home and start the second shift,” she said.

On her home visits, Stambaugh does a lot of education and support for the caregiver. She asks whether the caregiver is eating and sleeping. She makes sure the caregiver is staying busy outside the home. And she watches out for loss of pleasure in formerly loved activities.

She also tells the caregivers not to personalize what the patient says: “They'll be angry, they'll be negative and the caregiver thinks it's their fault. You don't want them to own it.”

Montana says caregivers need to give themselves permission for two things: let others help you; and take care of yourself.

“They're trying to do it all,” Montana says. “Caregivers need a support system.”

That means not only someone to share the duties of caring for the depressed person, but someone to talk to, a safe place to vent.

Caregivers also need to make sure they connect with the outside community. “That caregiver can get as housebound as the patient,” Stambaugh says.

She likes to encourage caregivers to get outside and enjoy a cool breeze or a ray of sun – “anything that takes them away from the hopeless helplessness of the moment.”

Osowski, the social worker, says she tries to remind caregivers that they can't make the patient better. And she urges them to become educated about depression and to get support for themselves.

Miller is now a program coordinator at the Cleveland chapter of NAMI and teaches a family education class. She says finding support and education at the nonprofit played an important role in her and her daughter surviving the daughter's depression.

“It was so reassuring to find someone to finally tell me what I was experiencing as a caregiver was normal,” she says. “It was like a blessing.”