Endofound Medical Conference 2017
"Breast, Ovary and Endometriosis"
October 28, 2017 - Lotte New York Palace Hotel
Enpowr Promoting Outreach and Recognition
Good morning. My name is Nina Baker and I'm the education and outreach coordinator for the Endometriosis Foundation.
As you know, endometriosis is a debilitating disease with many symptoms, ranging from severe chronic pain to infertility. As a result, endometriosis can cripple finances, relationships, academic endeavors and career aspirations. This is why early detection, specifically in adolescence, is key to improving quality of life and alleviating poor health outcomes.
To address this issue, Endofound launched its ENPOWR Project, Endometriosis: Promoting Outreach and Wide Recognition, a school and community-based endometriosis education program that arms adolescents with menstrual health information, including disease signs and symptoms.
ENPOWR aims to increase disease awareness and promote treatment-seeking behavior through a dynamic interactive lesson highlighting disease symptoms and treatment options. Each lesson given to both male and female students includes differentiated instruction, encourages participation and equips adolescents with the necessary tools to serve as advocates for their own health.
Sessions conclude with a call to action, in which attendees are encouraged to take the plunge and share information they learned with their friends and family to help further disseminate this critical information.
While in classrooms, we administer a pre-test and post-test to ensure that students are learning and digesting what we think is the most important endometriosis information. We ask questions ranging from "What body system does endometriosis affect?" to "What the best method is to help others?"
As you can imagine, most students have never heard the term 'endometriosis' before, nor do they understand its prevalence. As you can see, there's a vast improvement from their general knowledge, which is basically just an educated guess, to after our presentation. We also use this data to improve upon our lessons every year.
ENPOWR just celebrated its fourth anniversary month. In that time, we have educated 26,237 students through 795 presentations in 160 sites. The first three years of ENPOWR were strictly in classrooms around New York City.
Last year, we created the EduKit, which allows ENPOWR to be implemented anywhere at any time by anyone. Through this model, we have dramatically increased our student numbers due to the incredible dedicated volunteers that we have around the world. As you can see, we're outside of New York now. We've been in Florida, Minnesota, as well as Jamaica, Kenya and Nigeria.
Here are just a few quotes from teachers and students about the impact of the ENPOWR Project. This is actually a real picture of our volunteer in Jamaica presenting the EduKit to their students. I'll just read one to show you how powerful this lesson can be. "One of our students was not going to be able to graduate because she had too many absences. After she heard your presentation, she was diagnosed with endometriosis. Her absences were excused as a result, and she will be graduating in time in June."
If you like any more information about the ENPOWR Project, or how you can volunteer, we, again, rely very heavily on teachers and volunteers outside of New York City to implement it in your own state, in your hometown, so please come find me, or my co-worker Kimberly. I'd be happy to talk to you about it further. Thank you.
