Achievers
Red Cross receives $200,000 Weinberg grant
Advertiser Staff
The Hawai'i State Chapter of the American Red Cross has received a $200,000 gift from the Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. The donation is intended to help alleviate the budget shortfall experienced by the agency last fiscal year.
"The generous donation from the Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Foundation will help support our ongoing disaster relief and emergency preparedness programs," said Roger Dickson, chief executive officer of the local Red Cross. "Thanks to support like this, the Red Cross can continue to serve the community throughout the Hawaiian Islands."
Anti-tobacco grant
Gov. Ben Cayetano has awarded the Queen's Medical Center's Quit Tobacco Program a two-year, $84,000 grant to implement one of the first stop-smoking programs in the state that will be conducted in an acute-care setting with a clear methodology developed to help smokers in their efforts to quit.
The money is from the Hawai'i Tobacco Prevention and Control Trust Fund, using money from a settlement that Hawai'i and 45 other states reached with tobacco companies in 1999 in a series of lawsuits over health-care costs for smokers.
"We are thankful for this opportunity to expand our smoking cessation services to the community," said Beth Freitas, manager, Cancer and Neuroscience Institutes, the Queen's Medical Center. "In addition to significantly enhancing our services to smokers who want to quit, this grant supports education and training for QMC nurses as well as physicians and their office staff, that will focus on the unique influence they each have on changing the health of the community."
Approximately 2,000 smokers are expected to benefit from Queen's Quit Tobacco Program by using a combination of the following six components: the Quit Tobacco Hotline, a self-quit smoking manual, weekly clinics, support groups, quarterly seminars and a professional education program. The grant also provides money for a stop-smoking coach, a Queen's staff member, who will help smokers who are interested in quitting tailor the program to meet their individual needs.
Queen's Quit Tobacco staff will work with University of Hawai'i physician John Streltzer, who will coordinate the clinical staff of Addiction Fellows. Additional collaboration is planned with local chapters of the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association to increase use of stop-smoking services and expand the program to help more smokers quit.
Quit Tobacco components will have a phased launch. The Quit Tobacco Hotline (537-7300) went into effect in late August. Quarterly seminars titled "Control Your Smoking in a Non-Smoking World," will begin this month. For more information call the Queen's Referral Line at 537-7117.
