Days before their sporting events kicked off and hours before the Opening Ceremony, hundreds of Special Olympics athletes swarmed the Health Sciences Education Center at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities on June 20 for a healthy competition of sorts.
They were here for the Special Olympics Healthy Athletes® program, a series of free health screenings covering seven areas: vision/eye health, audiology, dentistry, prevention and nutrition, emotional health, physical therapy and podiatry.
To aid the effort, University of Minnesota healthcare students representing physical therapy, speech language pathology, dentistry, nursing, and other fields were helping to screen the athletes while gaining valuable experience working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).
Since its inception in 1997, the Healthy Athletes program has provided more than 2 million free health screenings for athletes with IDD — many of whom often receive substandard healthcare or virtually no care at all. In addition, Healthy Athletes has trained close to 300,000 health professionals and students to treat people with intellectual disabilities.
It’s a definite win-win for the athletes. Those needing eyeglasses (or an updated prescription) walk away with a free pair that same day, sponsored by the Lions Club, and athletes who need hearing aids also receive them that same day, courtesy of Starkey.
As a bonus (and among many other giveaways), athletes who go through at least five of the seven stations receive a pair of New Balance tennis shoes. As of midday Tuesday, some of the health stations had already screened more than half of the Special Olympics athletes.
The perfect space for interdisciplinary collaboration
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Healthy Athletes on Saturday, Vice Provost for Academic Health Sciences Brian Sick spoke about how fitting it is that the athletes are being served in the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Education Center — a building designed around the idea that the best healthcare happens when health education students learn together, train together and ultimately care for patients together. Healthy Athletes put those principles into action.
“For decades, healthcare education has occurred in silos,” Sick says. “Yet the patients we serve do not experience healthcare in silos. They experience it as a team sport. Their health outcomes depend on how well healthcare professionals communicate, collaborate, and coordinate their expertise around a shared goal.”
Sick points out that this is the first time that health science students have been purposefully and deeply integrated into the Healthy Athletes program.
Bringing smiles to athletes and providers alike
Third-year University of Minnesota audiology student Kerrigan Merricks was volunteering at the hearing screenings on Saturday — her second time helping with Special Olympics.
“It’s a great experience to be able to work with different populations of people. It’s very valuable to my studies and career and life in general,” Merricks says. “It’s also just super fun to get to know all the athletes and a fun event to be a part of.”
One of the athletes who had finished the audiology screening, Eli Hightshue from Greenwood, Indiana, was set to compete in golf this week. Hightshue says he doesn’t have his hearing checked very often and was happy to learn that his hearing “is really good.”
His father, Danny (who happens to be Eli’s caddie for the week), reiterated the importance of the screenings for people with intellectual disabilities. “Some of the athletes don’t necessarily have this opportunity — financially, they may not have the means to do it — so I think it’s great that they can do this,” he says. “Some of [the athletes] might not have an idea of what each station means to them, what it’s about, so educationally it’s a perfect thing for them.”
Matt Roskop, a softball player from Buffalo, Minnesota, was gearing up to play in his first Special Olympics USA Games and had already gone through six of the seven screenings. He learned that he needed an updated prescription for his eyeglasses, which likely would help him both in right-center field and at the plate. He says the vision screening was awesome, and he was looking forward to receiving the new glasses he chose with stylish metal frames.
Megan Viozzi, a first-year University of Minnesota medical student from Rochester, was helping with the vision assessments. Viozzi is interested in ophthalmology as a potential specialty, and she learned about the Healthy Athletes screenings from some friends who are in the Disability Health Advocacy Student Group, which educates healthcare students about how to best care for differently abled people.
“Seeing how many people are coming through and how many people maybe do need glasses — or their prescriptions are out of date and they’re not seeing super well — there’s clearly a need that I didn’t realize needed to be met,” she says. “It’s an amazing thing that athletes can go through and get, literally, start-to-finish glasses in like 30 minutes.”
Trying to make healthcare fun
The energy and excitement of the Special Olympics athletes was plain to see at the Health Sciences Education Center, even with the gauntlet of health screenings. And receiving those screenings in a non-threatening, fun environment, is a primary goal of the Special Smiles (dental) screenings, according to Carol Dahlke, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and clinical director for Minnesota Special Olympics. Her daughter Krista has been a Special Olympics athlete for 27 years, the last 20 of those as a golfer.
“From the dental student’s viewpoint, oftentimes they’re not going to be able to work with this population. Eighty-five percent of the folks that have an intellectual or developmental difference can be seen in a regular dental office, but they’re going to still get lost because of the insurance coverage, or the lack of it,” Dahlke says. “So this is a really great opportunity for them to work with someone who might be ‘different.’
“Society in general likes to minimize this population. And what I love about the Special Olympics is we actually maximize the abilities that our athletes have and then celebrate those. And the students get to see that.”
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