What's Next for the CORE Healthy Aging Initiative?

Oluwatoyin (Toyin) Adeyemi, MD, attending physician of infectious diseases, at Cook County Health and Hospital System, discusses the next steps in implementing activities for the CORE Healthy Aging Initiative.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“The title of our poster [read] “Initial Data,” because these were just things that we gathered and put the information together for the conference. But what we plan to do with that information is to actually have activities and initiatives at the CORE Center, for the patients. One of the initial things is getting a community advisory board of older adults who are in our clinic setting to help design the best strategies to get this information out. [We also want to] have a resource fair targeted HIV[-infected] older adults to leverage some of the resources in our community, get our people in social services, people in retirement planning, in income management, people who want to be interested in skills [such as] computer skills, and learning [and] figuring out things like that.

[We can implement] exercise classes, maybe have a running club, a walking club, nutrition classes where people can learn how to [read] food labels and eat healthy and maybe have ways where we can have competitions and have targets for weight loss or muscle mass or exercise.

Now that we know what the issues are, we’re going to sort some of that out and maybe have one or two focus groups to further decide how well to answer those questions and strategize focus groups also by gender, because there were some unique differences that we saw. [We want] to use that information to do things that we can then transfer outside of that to help our patients; a lot of it [includes] just health literacy, and having them know about resources available to them as they age with HIV and just the importance of living healthy, helping with smoking cessation and things like that.”