By Michelle Lepitre
If you are a frequent reader of our About Townshippers column, you may already know about the Community Health Education Program, also known as CHEP. If you’re new to this column, this pro-gram may be new to you too. In both cases, I think you’ll be interested to learn more about the CHEP, its purpose, how it has changed since 2020, and how you can join in an upcoming CHEP ses-sion and connect with English-speaking health care professionals who have valuable information to share with you.
CHEP is offered by Townshippers’ Association through a partnership with the CHSSN, or the Com-munity Health and Social Services Network. It is intended to enhance access to English-language health information, resources, services, and support. Through regular videoconference sessions, the CHEP sessions offer our NPI agents a way to regularly share important information with you about topics that touch on health and well-being.
In the past, Townshippers’ Association worked with the local CLCs, or community learning centres, to host regular CHEP events, where people gathered to watch video conference presentations by qualified health care professionals, to ask questions and get information from those presenters, and to fit in a bit of social time with other community members.
Unfortunately, the regular CHEP events that we all enjoy became impossible to carry out during the pandemic. As a result, the CHEP sessions were adapted in 2020 to meet public health require-ments and to stay accessible to people at a distance. This unfortunately meant that the social part of the CHEP events had to be put on hold, but it also had one great advantage: the presentations became even easier to participate in! Now, you can join in a CHEP session directly from the com-fort of your own home through the Zoom video conferencing platform. In this way, you still have access to the same useful information as you did before – and you can stay connected to our Town-shippers’ Association’s NPI agents, Cisco and Kelly – without ever leaving your home.
The CHEP videoconferences take place on the third Wednesday of the month, between 10:00 am and 11:30 am, from September to June (with no sessions in December or in March). In recent months, presenters have discussed:
• The role of a community pharmacist
• Ticks and lyme disease
• Vision/eye care
• Medical emergencies in seniors
• Dementia education
• Fall prevention
• Decluttering
Topics for the CHEP presentations are selected based on the needs of English speakers across the province and so we’d love to know what topics you’d like to learn more about so we can share your suggestions with the CHEP program’s organizing team. To share your ideas with us, you can send an email to Kelly, NPI Agent for the Eastern Townships Partners for Health and Social Services Network in the Montérégie-East: kb@townshippers.org.
For information about the dates, times, and topics for upcoming CHEP videoconferences, you can:
• Like our Facebook page, where we regularly share information about upcoming CHEP events;
• Visit the Community Calendar on our website: https://townshippers.org/calendar/;
• Read the Townships Crier and What’s On event listings in The Sherbrooke Record and the Community Calendar in the Brome County News.
For more information about the CHEP program, or to receive a link to sign up for an upcoming vid-eoconference, you can also contact Kelly Bush: kb@townshippers.org.
This monthly column keeps you in touch with Townshippers’ Association’s activities and news. Other ways to keep in touch:
Online:
www.townshippers.org
Facebook.com/Townshippers
Twitter @Townshippers
In person:
3355 College St., Sherbrooke
3-584 Knowlton Rd., Lac-Brome
By phone
819-566-5717
450-242-4421
