Community chatter

Your local Public Health and the Hot Springs County Prevention Coalition have been busy. Who are these people and what have they been up to?

Prevention takes a community effort and the coalition is working together to bring health, wellness and positive change to our community. You may be familiar with our local Public Health office, but did you know they work closely with the Hot Springs County Prevention Coalition? Your local prevention coalition is a community group made up from different agencies as well as individual community members. Public Health, along with local county commissioners, law enforcement, school personnel, the hospital, Lights On, Youth Alternatives, local counseling centers, Hope Agency, Red Rock Family Practice, our County Attorneys’ office, Chamber of Commerce, Pioneer Home, Senior Center, DFS, the Ministerial Association, and many other individuals from the community.

The coalition is working on various projects in the community. Their efforts focus on prevention of underage drinking, adult binge drinking, tobacco and vape use prevention, suicide prevention as well as mental health advocacy. The following is a not a complete list but a small summary of a few of the programs being promoted in Hot Springs County.

To address underage drinking the “Parents Who Host Lose The Most” public awareness campaign is filtering into our community and you will soon see flyers and posters around town. This program aims to educate parents and caregivers about the risks of underage drinking and urges them not to allow it in their home. Parents may erroneously believe hosting a party for underage kids to drink is a safe environment for their children to drink, but often don’t consider the health effects on our youth. Alcohol is harmful to adolescent health and their developing brain, and this campaign aims to educate the parents of our community.

Other efforts aimed at underage alcohol use include alcohol compliance checks conducted by our local law enforcement. This past December, alcohol compliance checks were done and every business did their due diligence with 0 violations! Keep up the good work Thermopolis! Plans are in place to continue alcohol compliance checks as well as adding tobacco compliance checks community-wide.

Prevention efforts aimed at adult binge drinking have begun through Training, Intervention, Procedures (TIPS) training. TIPS training aims to educate those people in our community that serve alcohol to be responsible and learn tools that prevent over-serving, drunk driving and underage drinking. In April 2019, a TIPS training was held in Thermopolis, with trainers from Washakie County because there were none available in Hot Springs County. Now, through prevention efforts we have two members in our community from the local police department certified to provide this training to our community. The prevention coalition aims to have all alcohol servers TIPS trained.

Are you considering quitting smoking or tobacco use? The prevention coalition has begun promoting the Wyoming Quit Tobacco Program for adults and My Life My Quit for teens. The adult program can be accessed by community members simply calling 1-800-QUIT-NOW. Wyoming Quit Tobacco Program offers things such as coaching, patches and gum as well as assistance with creating an individual plan to quit. The youth program focuses on education and coaching to assist with tobacco use prevention. More information can be found at http://www.mylifemyquit.com or by texting “Start My Quit” to 855-891-9989.

The prevention coalition is excited to bring the program Sources of Strength to the students of our High School. Sources of Strength is a suicide prevention program which was introduced in December 2019.

The mission of the program is to prevent suicide by increasing help seeking behaviors and promoting connections between peers and caring adults. With the support of adult mentors, this program is student led. The peer leaders have begun working on different campaigns within the school to identify strengths amongst their peers and will continue through the school year. The coalition will soon implement this program at the middle school. More information about Sources of Strength can be found at http://www.sourcesofstrength.org

Other efforts towards suicide prevention have been implemented and recently two members of the coalition have become certified as Question Persuade Refer (QPR) gatekeeper trainers. QPR is an evidence based suicide prevention program. More information will be available soon as the coalition will provide community wide trainings as well as “lunch and learns” for local businesses or organizations interested.

This small list just touches base on a few of the coalition’s current projects. Gun locks and medication lock boxes are also available to the community free of charge. For more information or if you are a community member who would like to get involved, please visit the Hot Springs County Prevention Coalition website at http://www.hotspringscountyprevention.org.