Occupy NOLA Wellness Working Group

11/21/2011

Robert and I met up for Wellness meeting this Sunday and discussed the new tent and check up hours. Jessica (whose birthday it was Sunday!) and Robert have watched over the tent at night this week. Robert has been opening up the tent for check ups from noon to 6 each day and tallying 3-5 people per day for whom he has provided care. The issues coming up are ranging from boot rot and injuries to chronic illness symptoms and mental health peer-to-peer counseling. In a number of cases he has deferred the occupiers to the Tulane University Hospital down the street or off-site psychological counseling.

Overall our stocks are still really low, but the main needs Robert has called out for are a blood pressure cuff (another individual also asked for that), ace bandages, gauze, slings, and a stethoscope. There were no major supplies missing this week; Robert has taken the orange first-aid kit to keep on his person and packed it for his use as a responder to emergency situations on-site.

While there was one individual who defecated in the medic tent, overall it seems that the news space has improved organization and cleanliness. Keeping water supplies in the tent has increased foot traffic there, which may evolve into a problem, but we still think it's important to have water easily accessible during check ups.

Two of our wellness working group members will be off-site for the Thanksgiving holidays, so if you are around please chip in and hang out at the medic tent from time to time!

11/17/2011

Occupy New Orleans on Livestream.

11/16/2011

Please remember this guys face. He was an FBI informant here in NOLA. He has been seen up in Oakland recently.

11/14/2011

Minutes from 11/13 Wellness Working Group Meeting

Our meeting this week doubled as a work party, and we were joined by
many hard working friends to set up our excellent new Wellness tent!
We moved our remaining medic station furniture and supplies to the
tent, but left personal hygiene content, which had been mixed in with
medical, in the pavilion. We are all super excited to have our new
wheel-chair accessible, more private space to build capacity in.

We are proud to welcome Robert, trained in EMT basic, and Jessica,
trained as an LPN, to our working group, and they'll be running night
shift watch of the medic station. Altercations has been joined by
Shanell for daytime on-site wellness folks. And we all appreciate Dr.
Heidi so much for joining us in occupier "check ups." An infectious
disease doctor from California, Dr. Omega, swung by with a whole bunch
of donations from himself and two visiting medical students. He also
brought by a person from the New Orleans Water and Sewerage Board who is going to try to enlist some massive water donations from his
coworkers. Thanks to Altercations who met and helped out Dr. Omega
earlier in the day!

Occupy NOLA is doing so well, experiencing a real triumphant growth
spurt, and seeing great improvement in communication: everyone is
talking to one another and working together in a much improved manner! What this means for wellness, however, is that we are running really low, as in completely-out-of, many of our supplies, and occupiers are communicating more clearly their wellness needs, so we have much much more to add to our needs list.

Some of the more common complaints are chronic coughs, which can be
easily treated with honey and tea. If you are feeling generous, host a
tea time on-site or donate some lemons, honey, and tea! And also
there's a need for detoxification, if you are into acupuncture or have
some good herbal remedies, you are a good ally to have for Occupy!

Unfortunately, some of our most important medical equipment has been
taken: the glucometer and thermometer have gone missing. We really
need those replaced and a lockbox to keep them in. Let's try to
remember, donations are made by people who really care about our
movement, we thank them profusely for their support and respect those
items for their intended purpose!

Amy is going to be away for a few days this week, so if you are at
school or work in the area, and can stop by and “man the tent” for an
hour or so once in while, please come join us! We are looking to build
capacity over time and are extending an invitation to those who may
have expressed interest in the past and others who we have been
hoping to collaborate with. Some of the ways you can help out are:

Offer medical check-ups, massage, reiki, acupuncture, one-on-one
nutrition consultations on a Sunday between 2-4. Ideally, we will have
enough working group members to offer check-ups every evening.

Offer wellness skillshares (for example, Bridge training, street-
medicking, nutrition, de-escalation and conflict resolution)on Fridays
or Sundays to the working group or the larger Occupy group.

Come “man the tent” for a few hours a week: organize supplies, update
needs list, be available to support those using the self-care first-
aid station.

If spending time at Occupy is not possible for you, there are other
ways to show support.

Make copies of our zines and self-care guides or print our logo for
signs and arm bands (we currently need more copies of the Black Cross
“Activist's Guide to First Aid” and another “Grounding Exercise for
Someone in Acute Stress” email for the files!)

Check our needs list each week and donate some supplies

Invite occupiers to your clinic or medical facility for screenings

Sign on as an phone-only medical consultant or an on-call shuttle
service

Share our updates with your friends

Be available as a street medic at direct actions (come with a first-
aid kit and some bottled water)

Please support Occupy Wellness if you can't be here or if you have
easier access to these listed items by dropping off donations with us
at the medic tent. You can contact us at occupynolawelln....com
if you have any questions or need to work out a mail delivery: we will
respond super quickly!

Needs list

in bulk:

multivitamin
vitamin C
emergen-C
gloves (medical grade please)
masks
ibuprofen
acetaminophen
tissues
condoms
electrolyte drinks
benadryl
epi-pen
antibiotic cream
hydrocortisone creams

just a one-time call out:

furniture for our tent: cot, chairs, massage table, shelving
camping
lantern for night light
dry erase markers
glucometer
thermometer
electronic blood pressure cuff
nurse's stethoscope
index cards and a locking index card box (preferably with a
combination rather than key)
large lockboxes for our more sensitive items

Thank you all for your work and donations!

This Thursday, November 17th is an all-day community action, if you
are available for any portion of that day, please come out with your
first aid kits and street medic!

11/10/2011

The evidence is clear: The Southeast has the highest rates of both new HIV diagnoses and HIV deaths, as well as poor social determinants of health. We therefore request that resources be targeted to develop models of integrated HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment for rural, midsize, and urban c...

11/10/2011

In the last four weeks, many have been wondering what has driven people to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and bring attention to the economic situation that has developed in our country. Critics have argued that so many issues are being discussed and that so many disparate groups have joined forces, that ...

11/07/2011

Minutes from Sunday 11/6 Wellness Working Group Meeting

Today we were joined by Altercations Solutions, our new on-site wellness working group member, and medical student Lauren! We sat together in the shade and imagined our ideal medic space and function and planned for some capacity building—we welcome y'all to come to next week's Sunday meeting at 1pm to support and collaborate!

Our first order of business was outreach to medics, in three parts: 1. the awesome medical students who have shown interest (thank you all!) 2. the herbalists, social workers, and other potential collaborators out there and 3. street medic trainings.

1. For medical students: we want to have a Bridge training come December or January (when we'll have put together our resources). Basically, a Bridge training helps individuals trained in traditional Western medical spaces (medical school, nurses or EMTs) understand the history and the ethics of street medic-ing. Quickly, street medicking developed in the 60s in response to EMTs who could not cross over protest lines by medically trained or just concerned individuals who wanted to address health concerns on the protesting side. There is a main focus in street medicking on understanding how social structure of oppression are evident in our interactions, both as it relates to the lived experience of the folks we are asking consent of to treat, as well as rejecting the hierarchical hospital system of command. Issues of consent are paramount here: individuals may not want to be treated in a certain way. Specifically street medics have training in treating injuries from police weapons, like eye flushes for pepper spray and tear gas, but more so the street medic skills are in prevention: preparedness for arrest, being solid and grounded for direct actions. In occupying space the emphasis on prevention is even stronger; we try to engage the occupiers in staying healthy and cutting illness short with vitamins, emergen-c, etc.


An excellent read is this “Alternatives to Emergency Medical Services,” written by the Rosehips Medic Collective of Portland, ORhttp://www.rosehipmedics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Alt2EMSdigitalprintMay9.pdf

Lauren expressed interest in engaging faculty support at her medical school, providing “check ups” for occupiers, and helping to stock first aid supplies.

In response to the question: “should we identify ourselves in uniform or name tags?” we all agreed that identification is not advised: we don't want to put anyone off who might be uncomfortable with medical staff, and we want to emphasize we are all sharing equally and in this together. Amy shared the fact that we don't talk to the media either.

2. With the addition of Altercations to our wellness working group, and her daily participation as a wellness working group member who will be staying on site, we believe we can expand our capacity to welcome more outside collaboration partnerships with herbalists who have shown interest in the past, as well as other alternative participants, massage therapists, acupuncturists, etc. Amy and Nora will proof a little phone and email transcript to see if we can reach out more and invite more involvement at our Sunday 1pm meetings.

3. Street medic trainings are still in the works for December/January as we are at school/work/occupy capacity til Winter break.

Next: our medic structure! We consensed against accepting money for a fairground tent, but Amy will ask the donators to make the purchase of a fairground tent with the funds they raised. Specifically we want a sturdy fairground tent that comes with detachable walls for privacy. Altercations can come along to help pick it out.

We will set up, hopefully by next Sunday's meeting, the fairground tent on a patch of level ground, easily accessible from the walkways in Alex Avery Park in front of the statue adjacent to the Cypress grove. It has good light, is far back enough to ensure privacy from the pavilion, but still prominent in the park.

We hope to furnish the medic tent with shelving, we have a table, and a massage table. There are massage therapists, individuals trained in reiki, etc. who would make use of this very often, and it would help all of us decompress and relax!

Also starting next Sunday we will have the hours of 2-4 be available for occupiers who want check ups. Ideally we will have capacity to offer a set time every evening for check ups. Some of us feel only comfortable asking “how are you feeling,” while Lauren has suggested taking blood pressure, listening to heart rates and lungs. Any one who wants to donate a portion of their time to do check ups please let us know and come Sunday!

Another need we identified, which had been brought up but not yet addressed, is a hand-washing station at the porta-potties. Altercation suggested a quick and easy method: a water cooler filled with a rubbing alcohol-water mix.

Thank you to Nick for the donation to our diabetes safe needle disposal station. We can now offer some clean needles to those who are unable to access their own.

The updated needs list is:
massage table
water cooler
rubbing alcohol
arnica ointment or tiger balm or both
B-complex vitamins
more Emergen-C (we go through these a lot!)
more working group members

11/04/2011

Share this:
Hi Friends!

Below is a health professionals solidarity statement with Occupy Boston and Occupy movements worldwide. Letter text is below.
If you would like to sign the letter, go to: http://tinyurl.com/OccupyBostonHealthSolidarity

Health Professionals Statement of Solidarity with Occupy Boston
As Massachusetts health advocates and providers for the 99%, we stand with Occupy Boston and similar movements across the country and around the world. We are outraged at the accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the many and the appropriation of our government by corporations that value profits over people. The skewed distribution of resources in the U.S. reflects deep-rooted illness in the fabric of our society and inflicts serious health consequences.

We gain strength and inspiration from the United Nations’ Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms the rights of all people to
food, clothing, housing, and medical care. Despite such internationally
recognized declarations, we bear witness to the fact that in Massachusetts, tens of thousands of our neighbors have no health
insurance whatsoever, while millions more find themselves increasingly
unable to afford necessary care. Hospital CEOs and insurance companies accumulate unprecedented wealth and power, while nursing work hours are cut to unsafe staffing levels, and medical debt remains the number one cause of personal bankruptcy nationwide. Budget cuts to the Massachusetts mental health system have eliminated vital services and have led to higher rates of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, homelessness, and incarceration. As Medicaid and Medicare budgets are slashed, we remain the only nation in the world whose government refuses to negotiate prices of patented medications.

Though we spend more than twice as much per capita on health care
than any other nation in the world, we are the only industrialized
nation that fails to provide universal health care. Currently, we rank
46th internationally for infant mortality, with approximately 6 deaths
for every 1,000 children born. These terrible losses are not shared
equally throughout our society. Here in Massachusetts, even with rates
that are lower than the national average, infant deaths are twice as
high in Black families than among Whites. We will not be silent in the
face of such injustice. We believe that an honest pursuit of the right
to health requires a comprehensive, national single-payer health system provided automatically to everyone.

The assault on the health of the 99% extends beyond medical care.
For poor women across the country, barriers to healthy lives and
families are further compounded by legislation that carves away women’s reproductive rights. Stripping workers of collective bargaining rights and reducing environmental regulations have made the U.S. a less safe place to live and work. The loss of millions of homes to foreclosure has been directly correlated with an increase in su***de attempts. Harsh anti-immigrant legislation creates a climate of fear which prevents families from accessing essential services and undermines public health. In our current recession, 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and there has been a drastic 32% rise in food insecurity. We seek to defend the human rights of all of us, especially those made most vulnerable by systemic injustices.

Only through collective action can we tackle these social ills and
and truly promote the health of the 99%. To this end, we offer our
support to the Occupy movements in Boston and around the globe, and
pledge to work together to build a new society, one which protects and
advances basic human rights for all.

Written by the Health Justice Boston Working Group, a working group
made up of Boston area physicians, nurses, social workers, students,
public health advocates, and community members.

11/03/2011

Tonight: Free school offering Radical Mental Health Discussion Group http://nolafreeschoolnetwork.blogspot.com/

**This is not at the Occupy site, but I encourage Occupy-ers to come along**

This is our second class. The reading for today is "Making Sense of Being Called Crazy in a Crazy World," starts at page 16:http://theicarusproject.net/files/navigating_the_space.pdf

The New Orleans Free School Network offers quality, no-cost, volunteer-run, community-based educational opportunities for adults throughout the city of New Orleans. Classes and workshops directly respond to neighborhood- and community-specific desires and needs. The New Orleans Free School Network ...

10/31/2011

Yesterday Wellness Working Group met at the medic table for our Sunday 1 pm working group meeting. We will be there every Sunday at 1pm and urge all interested and supportive parties to come along!

We spent 2+ hours cleaning the self-care station, organizing the zine library, and relocating our stores of donations. Hopefully a better organizational tactic with our materials will mean less mess and less unethical appropriating of resources.

Some more immediate needs that we have are:
-antibiotic ointment
-ace wraps
-saline for cleaning wounds
-emergen-C

We are still working on getting a tent and thank the numerous folks who have offered assistance and raised funds for that purpose. It's slow going because we are still negotiating the do-we-take-dollars or do-we-request-tent-instead discussion.

There are two pamphlets we are running low on. If anyone has the capability to print out and drop off (or request a bike pick up) these zines, please let us know:
An Activist's Guide to First Aid http://www.blackcrosscollective.org/page14.html
Your Guide to Safer Spaces at Occupy New Orleans https://docs.google.com/open?id=1smxObg8I453n4BNTFeVxpi1x43oyUNdIZbnv0Pno_9sDH-3TAwAaLQ_2wQg4

*these printable versions are printed "double sided flip on short edge"

News regarding the sharps disposal: the syringe exchange's hours are not as posted on the website; they are in fact only open on Fridays 12-2. Nora will will transport the sharps container and exchange used for sterile, new ones on Fridays as needed. There is a small diabetes area in our medic table with the safe sharps home disposal kit, glucose testing, a book on nutrition for folks with diabetes, etc.

A reminder, Wellness working group members urge anyone and everyone who can come out on Wednesday evening to join in the Anti-Racism Group's workshop on Safe Space. This is a vital skillshare for the community at the encampment as well as the online contributors.
What: Safe Space Workshop
When: Wednesday, November 2, at 7
Where: the General Assembly spot in Alex Avery Park (formerly Duncan Plaza), adjacent to Gravier St. There is street parking and a handicapped accessible ramp.

Again, We extend a warm welcome to individuals who want to support the Wellness group on-site and from afar. Leave messages in the suggestion box at the medic table, e-mail us at [email protected], “like” us on facebook, and/or join our google group!

10/29/2011

A message from a friend about hand warmers:

In DC, back around 2004 or so, we passed out hundreds of disposable
handwarmers Nobody seemed particularly impressed by them. They take
a long time to heat up, so we found a lot of them discarded on the
ground actually - just starting to get warm.

There is another, re-usable kind of handwarmer. You can get them in
bulk for about 4 times what the disposables cost (2.25 versus 0.50).
Even if a bunch walk off, it might be a more cost efficient option for
these more stable encampment types of protests.

An idea is to order them custom printed (few cents more per item
on a 500 unit order, but two week lead time) with information about
where to return them and/or send a donation (and maybe hypothermia
warning signs on the other side). Pricey, but would have been a
long-term infrastructure investment that would last a long time and
maybe even fund itself given the size of the actions that rolled through
town. I'd also hoped to see about getting grant/donation money to
circulate differently printed ones among the local homeless and arrange
for collection sites so we could re-heat them.

10/26/2011

Radical Mental Health Discussion Group, NOLA Free School Network

Thursdays! At 8!

A discussion group focusing on radical ideas of mental health, both theory and practice. How does the psychiatric system abuse and control those who are differently abled or do not fit into the model of 'normalcy'? How does that tie into the capitalist system as a whole? How can we better take care of our bodies, minds and communities in order to promote mental health? This class will primarily follow Icarus Project philosophy and materials, as well as encourage everyone's own thoughts and ideas around this under addressed yet important and fascinating subject.

Contact: Kate at [email protected]
at 2030 Dumaine St