Nuestra Salud (Our Health), a Spanish-language health education radio program, recently celebrated its 15th anniversary on the air.
The monthly two-hour program offers information about a variety of health topics important to the Latinx community in Madison. The information is often presented by professionals in the healthcare field, and includes resources related to the topics available in the community. The program offered on La Movida Radio, in partnership with Quartz, UW Health and the Latino Health Council.
The show’s schedule is available on the La Movida website.
“It is very exciting because when we started 15 years ago we didn’t know if the community was going to be receptive, and soon after we realized it was very necessary,” said Dr. Patricia Tellez-Giron, chair of the Latino Health Council and an associate professor in the department of family medicine and community health at UW. “We have a captive audience, they don’t need to go anywhere and now we’re also on the internet.”
Nuestra Salud is just one of the many programs offered by the Latino Health Council. It started out as a radio program giving information about cancer, but they wanted to reach the larger community with resources that would help. Then, Quartz Health Insurance began partnering with the council and wanted to help with the radio program. They agreed to pilot the program for a year, and Nuestra Salud has been going ever since.
“It had been amazing, starting with back then the Latinx community was small and through the years we have grown,” Tellez-Giron said. “We have people from various Latin American countries, we have been building up even more throughout the years.”
The impact has been incredible. Tellez-Giron, a practicing physician said there were times her patients relayed messages they heard from the radio show.
“We get a lot of feedback from the community,” she said. “Now also the kinds of questions people will ask are more educated, and more related to the topic than it was 15 years ago.”
Though it’s already been 15 years, Nuestra Salud won’t be slowing down anytime soon.
“Every year when we think our mission is done, we realize that we have populations that are very transient, and they may not know all the information,” Tellez-Giron said.
Because of this, Nuestra Salud also includes two programs a year where anyone can ask questions about anything they need help with in order to offer resources that some may not know about. While the program is running, all commercials are also related to health topics, so that even if the audience isn’t listening to the program, they can retain important information from the ads.
“Health education is important, and so are community resources,” Tellez-Giron said.
