Dr. Robert Boyd and his staff at the Wellness Day event

By Joe Bayona

SOUTH AMBOY – On Wednesday, March 26, a free “Medicare Wellness Day” was held at The Charles W. Hoffman Senior Center located at the South Amboy YMCA.

The event was the brainchild of Dr. Robert D. Boyd of the Woodbridge Medical Group.

“It all started as a screening for people at risk for falling,” said Boyd, “When Medicare and associated insurance companies did an audit and realized that they were spending an exorbitant amount of money on fall-related injuries, mainly broken hips.”

It was then that Dr. Boyd got the idea to put together a 10-page questionnaire that people could fill out. By answering a series of questions they would be able to screen for people who were most at risk for falling, and take preventative actions.

From there, Wellness Day blossomed.

“I made it up as it went along,” said Dr Boyd.

Participants at the Annual Wellness Day

Some of the participants would say, why don’t you test for this or look for that. So a series of non invasive tests were added. These tests would look for things that are not normally looked for in a typical annual checkup, like peripheral artery disease, abdominal aneurysms, and bone density scans, to name a few.

“We started conducting the screening for people at risk for falling last March,” said Lesly Abril, administrative assistant for the Woodbridge Medical Group. “We conduct about 65 of these a year through Middlesex county and parts of Union County.”

Medicare picks up the tab with no deductible. There is absolutely no charge to the people who participate.