From the Oberlin Herald, March 3, 2010
Teams in our twelve-week Care For Your Heart Fitness Program continue to shed pounds. Almost half of our facility’s employees are taking part, which is keeping our exercise and weight lifting equipment busy in the mornings, evenings and weekends. Some are electing to rise an hour or half hour earlier to walk the weight off. Each team is taking a turn providing health-inspiring information, in the form of information on how to read food labels, healthy recipes, resource websites, or other motivational materials. At the mid-way point, 300 unwanted pounds had been lost. Competition has become fierce. Participants paid a small registration fee, and any participant who shows a weight gain at the weekly weigh-in is fined a dollar, all of which goes into a kitty. In the end, the team losing the greatest percentage will win the money, but all teams will come out winners by losing.
In January 2010, the Decatur Health Systems laboratory expanded by adding the new service of Microbiology, under the direction of Jodi Votapka, who is the lab manager at our facility and also the lab director at Oberlin Medical Arts. The science of microbiology is the isolation and identification of microorganisms. If a pathogen is identified during routine culture testing, a MIC (various antibiotics efficiency is tested with the isolated pathogen) is evaluated and reported to our physicians. Microbiology cultures can be obtained from various sources: Urine, Stool, Blood, Ear, Nose, Throat, and Wounds are just a few examples. All microbiology cultures from the hospital and Oberlin Medical Arts are being evaluated and reported in our department. All these services were previously analyzed outside our facility at our reference laboratory.