Kirsten Gram
After one term of engineering school at OSU, Portland native Kirsten Gram decided to become a dietician. "I went into home economics because I like to cook," says Gram, who graduated in 1984, then served an internship in diabetes education in a children's hospital at Indiana University. Returning to Oregon, she found work in the dietary department at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. "I've been here 22 years," she says, though "here" is now Cascade Health Solutions, a non-profit group of health-care programs that seceded when the hospital was sold. When she started, Gram ran a weight-management program. Today, in her 10th year as manager of CHS's Center for Healthy Living, her main focus is diabetes education. "One in 10 Americans over 20 has diabetes," she notes. "A third of them don't know they have it." Gram and three other certified educators meet with 60 to 90 diabetes patients a month in individual and group sessions. At the annual meeting of the Oregon Diabetes Educators in April, Gram was named Oregon Diabetes Educator of the year.
happening people
photograph and story by Paul Neevel
Eugene Weekly / 5 June 2008
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