SMSC hosts Annual Community Health Fair

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By ASHLEY INGE
TheFlashToday.com

STEPHENVILLE (August 7, 2018) – The Stephenville Medical and Surgical Clinic (SMSC) is hosting their annual community health and safety fair on Saturday, Aug. 11 at Henderson Junior High School in the cafeteria from 9 a.m. until noon.

Participants can get free health screenings by getting their height and weight measured; they can test their blood sugar; they can check their blood pressure, vision and hearing; and they can even get a skin screening so they can test for skin cancer.

Along with the health screenings, the health fair will also have various giveaways.

The health fair coordinator, JoAnn Shipman, explained more about the prizes and drawings.

“There are giveaways, freebie stuff, like pens, notepads and things like that that people give away,” Shipman said. “We also do door prizes. Some of the vendors will bring a door prize, and so we try to give door prizes away all throughout the morning. This year we have a grand prize of an Adele laptop. Allergy Services of America donated it. That’s our grand prize and we require  people (who) want to win are present when their name is called.”

The Stephenville School Supply Organization will be at the health and safety fair as well.

“This will be our third year, I believe, with them. We just combined the two events. It doesn’t benefit them a lot, but it benefits the people that they help with the school supplies even more because they’re coming through all of the health-related things that they otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to,” Shipman said. “It’s hard to describe; it’s like chaos, but it’s a good chaos. There are kids everywhere. There are adults everywhere and they’re going through the different booths, picking up their school supplies at the same time, but we’re really glad that they asked us to do that because it’s worked out very well for both of us. They put their school supplies up on the stage and then we have the floor for our vendors and it just works out very well. It’s just a good partnership.

This event has been in Stephenville for around 10 years and Shipman said she’s grateful that this event exists so that people can get the kind of help and health care that they need in one place.

“It (The community health and safety fair) is going to expose people to some things that they might not otherwise come across in their day-to-day activities. There are new things coming out all of the time in medicine and new services here in town and new organizations to help people. We just bring them all together. The people only have to go to one place. They don’t have to wander all over town or make phone calls all over town to try to find the kind of help they need; it’s all right there in one room,” Shipman said. “I just think it’s beneficial because of the kind of information and health screenings that we do. So that’s what we’re hoping is that people take advantage of those free screenings because it can save them a lot of money. We just hope that we can open doors to people for things they need and let them know what’s here in our community because we have a lot of resources for people in need. That’s the main focus — to connect people that are in need with the organizations that have what they need.”

Shipman said she is also happy that the SMSC can do this for the community.

“The community supports us by coming out here when they‘re not feeling well and such. We feel like it’s a return of the support by offering this type of event and of course not charging for it,” Shipman said. “Being able to help people — that’s why I feel like I was put on this earth is to help people so if I can walk away Saturday morning feeling like that, then I’m happy and so is everybody else (who) helps out with it because it’s so wonderful to see all of the people and know that they’re getting the information that they need.”

“And somebody is going to walk away with a free computer,” Shipman added.


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