Dr. Willie Mae Hubbard, back center, career Pediatric physician, and certified medical assistant April Caslin, right, encourages Koreyon Redding to exhale rapidly into a new digital spirometer that measures lung function last week at Family Health Service in Eastdale.
The Vitalograph unit is designed to one way clinics are helping to fight asthma in the schools.The young woman was exhaling as hard as she could into the plastic spout she held tightly in her mouth, but everyone standing around her kept telling her to “blow-blow-blow-BLOW-BLOW-BLOW-BLOW.”
With a final gasp she pushed the last remaining air from her lungs and then inhaled deeply, as her colleagues at the Family Health Center on Wilcox Boulevard cheered.
The staff at the health center had been training for several days on how to use their new spirometer, a $1,000 handheld device that measures a patient’s lung capacity.
“That is how we measure how well the lungs are functioning,” said Dr. Willie Mae Hubbard, who along with Dr. Jacqueline Shaw is one of the co-founders of the center. “Some people don’t realize they are not functioning at a normal level, because they are so used to living in a compromised state.”
The spirometer was one of three donated this month to local clinics that serve students from poor neighborhoods by the Pediatric Health Improvement Coalition for the Tennessee Valley, a nonprofit organization funded by the Lyndhurst Foundation that hopes to improve the health care of area children.