A longtime counselor and administrator at Child Guidance & Family Solutions recently received statewide recognition for nearly three decades of work.
Thelma Greaser, 65, this month earned this year’s Susan J. Sears Counselor of the Year award from the Ohio Counseling Association.
Greaser recently retired as clinical manager/internship coordinator and senior clinical consultant for trauma at Child Guidance & Family Solutions, where she worked for 29 years.
She was recognized by the statewide group “for her many years of service to the association, her work with clients and her supervision, training and mentoring of counselors,” according to a news release.
Greaser estimates she touched the lives of thousands of families over the years in her roles as a counselor and a supervisor.
“I enjoyed what I did,” she said Monday in a telephone interview. “I felt like I was doing good work for the community.”
Greaser began her career as a special education teacher before becoming a case manager and then a counselor and supervisor.
Greaser, formerly of Norton, recently retired to North Carolina.
Child Guidance & Family Solutions specializes in mental and behavioral health care for children and their families throughout the region. The practice, based in Akron, also has locations in Barberton, Cuyahoga Falls and Twinsburg.
Help with coverage
Small-business owners can learn the basics of the Affordable Care Act and what it means for their companies and employees during U.S. Small Business Administration-sponsored free webinars on three Thursdays in December.
The federal health-care-reform law requires businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance. Though the Obama administration has delayed the penalty businesses would face if they did not comply with this mandate until 2015, the federal government and state governments have established marketplaces where businesses can buy group insurance plans. In Ohio, businesses can use the federal website, www.healthcare.gov.
The webinars begin at 2 p.m. Dec. 5 and the two following Thursdays: Dec. 12 and Dec. 19.
To register for a seminar, visit http://www.sba.gov/healthcare. Also at this website are articles about how provisions of the law affect self-employed individuals, employers with fewer than 25 employees, employers with up to 50 employees and employers with 50 or more employees. In addition, the website offers a glossary of health-care-reform terms, a timeline, the full text of the law, as well as specific information for each state and training materials.
Not big risk-takers
Getting health coverage doesn’t make people more likely to take risks with their health, according to a new study.
Researchers from University of California-Davis found people with health insurance are more likely to use preventive services, such as flu shots and health screenings.
But those with health insurance are no more likely than uninsured people to smoke, gain weight or engage in other risky behaviors, according to research results published this month in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
“The notion that people with insurance will exhibit riskier behavior is referred to by economists as ‘ex ante moral hazard’ and has its roots in the early days of the property insurance industry,” lead study author Anthony Jerant, professor of family and community medicine at UC-Davis, said in a news release. “After buying fire insurance, some people wouldn’t manage fire hazards on their property. But health care is different. Someone might not care if their insured warehouse burns down, but most people want desperately to avoid illness.”
Beacon Journal business writer Katie Byard contributed to this report. Cheryl Powell can be reached at 330-996-3902 or cpowell@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow Powell on Twitter at twitter.com/abjcherylpowell./