HRMC Wellness Challenge Encourages Employee Activity
Four HRMC employees earned top honors in the SD-I90 Challenge.
More than 100 Huron Regional Medical Center employees and spouses recently logged more than160,000 minutes of exercise over two months in a wellness challenge sponsored by the HRMC Foundation Helping Hands Fund, according to Paul Rann, executive director of the Foundation.
“Our Helping Hands fund is an annual opportunity for our employees to contribute to the Foundation,” explained Rann. “We try to engage donors in helping to decide what type of efforts their dollars support – this last year, wellness and challenges were at the top of the list.”
The South Dakota I-90 Wellness Challenge, provided by HRMC’s health plan provider Sanford Health, encouraged participants to log their daily activity for eight weeks and for each minute of exercise, they recorded one mile in travel through cities across the State.
“We had great interest and participation in this challenge and I’m proud of the 105 participants who made it the 372.09 miles across the State at least once,” said Rann.
Here are some results from the challenge:
108 participants traveled 160,894 miles (minutes exercised) across South Dakota – that’s 432 times across our great state!
On average, each participant exercised 1,490 minutes over 8 weeks or a little over 3 hours every week (180 minutes). This is something to celebrate because the benchmark for health is 2.5 hours (150 minutes) per week and HRMC’s average was more than that.
The median number of minutes exercised over the course of the challenge was 1,280 minutes, meaning ½ of participants were above and ½ were below this number. This translates into slightly over 2.5 hours per week. Meaning more than 50 percent of HRMC participants hit the benchmark of at least 150 minutes per week!
Participants who made it across the State received a free t-shirt with an outline of South Dakota and the slogan “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Everyone who completed the challenge was entered into a drawing for prize packs:Janna Rose was drawn as the winner of a fitness pack.
JoAnn Jones was drawn as the winner of a healthy cooking kit
Diane Brandsrud was drawn as the winner of a healthy eating basket
Nathan Hall was the winner of the Garmin Vivofit. His name was drawn from participants who finished in the top 20 percent of those who completed the challenge
“Because this challenge was so successful and we want to encourage our employees to engage in healthy behaviors, we are kicking off a new challenge May 4 called ‘Paint Your Plate,’” said Rann. “This challenge focuses on increasing fruit and vegetable consumption. We’ve also added a team c
omponent which will create a little healthy competition among our departments.”The mission of the HRMC Foundation is to bring the gifts of the community together to strengthen, support and enhance the Huron Regional Medical Center system of care. More information about the foundation is available online at www.hrmcfoundation.org.