Brigham Young University-Idaho's Wellness Center continues its mission to help employees and students reach optimal health by offering physical and mental assessments, while training students pursuing a career in the medical field.
The Wellness Center provides free stretch tests, body fat tests, skin fold tests, nutrition counseling, and a blood lipid profile test to all employees and their spouses.
"All employees can sign up with their spouses and come in and make an appointment and they do blood pressure checks and the blood draw, and give them all the numbers they need to submit to DMBA," said Wellness Center Manager Derik Taylor. "With benefits they get a $70 rebate just by having that test."
The university purchased a new N-body machine last year that can test the health of almost every aspect of a person's body. The test takes around thirty seconds and will tell a person their BMI, body fat percentage, and even weigh each appendage of the body. This machine will help the Wellness Center provide test results more quickly and accurately, while being able to offer some things it wasn't capable of before.
"Probably one of the most telling parts of that machine is it will tell you what your visceral fat count is, which means the fat around the organs of your insides," Taylor said.
Along with testing physical wellness, the Center has been working with the Department of Psychology to expand their services for mental wellness. While still in the beginning stages, these services will begin in full during Spring Semester 2016.
In addition to providing physical and mental evaluations, the Wellness Center also gives training to students looking to gain real-life experience for a future career in health. Some students are developing nutrition lessons that will be instituted as part of the Wellness Center's nutrition counseling.
"We've had a ton of success with students doing internships and getting their experience here," Taylor said. "When students have graduated and left, they've been getting very quality jobs based on the experience they've had."