The Mexico-Audrain County Library District recently began offering a new service in partnership with a local doctor – blood pressure monitors that can be checked out for two weeks at a time.
Christal Bruner, the director of the Mexico-Audrain County Library District, said she was approached by Dr. Alex Fink, a doctor at Cornerstone Family Medicine and grew up in the community.
“I'm one of these people, it's like, ‘We'll try it and we'll see if it works. If it works, I'm all for it,” and so, I said, “Sure,” and he wrote a grant to the American Heart Association where he was able to purchase them the monitors for us to have at all five of our locations.”
The library district has branches in Mexico, Farber, Laddonia, Martinsburg and Vandalia.
“It's really nice that all of our branches are able to have the blood pressure monitors available to check out there, or for people to come in and just sit down in a quiet area and just take their blood pressure and record it," Bruner said.
Bruner spoke about the new program, as well as a new collection of books they have, donated by the local health department, that helps explain this and other health conditions.
Missouri Health is spending March 2025 exploring the intersection of public health and public libraries. If you have a story you'd like to share, contact us at smithbecky@missouri.edu.
Christal Bruner: Libraries these days are really more than – to me, they've always been a little bit more than books, but definitely now with lots of the e-resources that are available.
We have just as many people that use our e-resources as we do our books,
Right now, us lending the blood pressure monitors – it came at a very, very good time because we do not have a hospital in our city or our county.
We do have emergency services, and we do have some doctors here, and we have our health department, and we have the Arthur Center, but we don't have a hospital.
So, that's one of the things that really drew us to, you know, working with Dr. Fink with the blood pressure monitors to maybe we could help some of the people that need to regulate their blood pressure, but they can't afford a blood pressure monitor – but they could come to the library and check one out for two weeks.
Because generally when a doctor wants you to check your blood pressure is usually for a two-week time span.
So, that gives them the opportunity every day for two weeks, or maybe more than every day, maybe twice a day, depending on what their doctors, you know, recommend to check their blood pressure.
The library takes a major part in there along with, you know, our other health partners because we provide information.
And so, the information that we provide can assist the doctors and it can assist the people that come in to read more and do a little research about what they have, and maybe they won't be so anxious about a diagnosis that they've received from their doctor.
That they may be able to say, “Okay, I'm reading about this, and we can do this together,” you know, “working with a doctor, seeing the library has the information, and doing what I'm supposed to do.”
Because one of the things we also do if we don't have a particular item at our library – a book or something that somebody wants – we have a wonderful interlibrary loan source where we can borrow books from other libraries, and it's free of charge. There's no charge to borrow the book.
So, if we do not have a book that maybe their doctor recommended, or maybe a friend recommended, or maybe they saw on television – we can borrow a book from another library and get that information.
