Health Care and Concept of Wellness
Whats is Wellness,Activities of Wellness and Goals of Wellness,Human Response to Illness,Nursing Pioneers and Wellness Movement,Emergence of Term Wellness,Wellness and Holistic Health,Use of Term Wellness in Health Care Providers and Layman,Model of Health and Wellness.
Whats is Wellness
maximizing the potential of which an individual is capable within the
environment where functioning occurs.
Wellness is both a process and a goal
that can be self selected by anyone of any age, in any setting, and with any
condition of health, illness, or disability.
Wellness as a process is a
movement toward greater individual awareness of activities that promote health,
active engagement in those activities, and the personal satisfaction that
results from active engagement.
Activities of Wellness and Goals of Wellness
Activities that promote health include physical
fitness, positive nutrition, positive relationships, stress management, clear
life purpose, consistent belief systems, commitment to self care, and
environmental comfort. The goal of wellness is self actualization.
Human Response to Illness
Nursing is concerned with the phenomena of human responses to
illness and health. Progress has been made to move nursing taxonomic language
to descriptors of wellness and its maintenance and promotion.
Quality of life
is increasingly a focus of health status for clients, family members, health
care providers, and other decision makers. The wellness model focuses on what
is “right” with the person and the quality of life an individual
enjoys.
Most theoretical thinking in nursing includes the integration of body,
mind, and spirit; the wellness orientation is consistent with most of this
thinking although less well defined.
Nurses in all arenas of practice,
education, research, and administration are influential in assisting clients in
making personal lifestyle changes directed toward wellness.
Nursing Pioneers and Wellness Movement
Nursing pioneers in the wellness movement adopted a holistic
approach and promoted wellness through self-care and self-responsibility.
Dimensions of a health-promoting lifestyle encompassing behaviors that serve to
maintain or enhance the wellness or self fulfillment of an individual were
identified and scientifically validated by nurse scientists.
Those dimensions
include health responsibility, nutrition, exercise, stress management,
interpersonal support, and self-actualization. Later, wellness practitioners
developed these themes into wellness practices.
Promotion of health is an
appropriate comparison for the wellness model because it emphasizes improving
one’s general state of health.
Further, the construct of health promotion
contains concepts that are more readily measurable yielding a stronger
conceptual basis for the abstract notion of wellness .
Emergence of Term Wellness
Dunn (1961) was the first to use the term wellness nearly 2 decades
before the concept of high-level wellness and holistic health were popularized
by Ardell, Travis, and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Dunn’s
writings reflect and acknowledge the ideas of thinkers such as Eric Fromm, Carl
Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Hans Selye, who were also concerned about how
individuals might achieve their full potential within their world.
Dunn equated
health with the integration of person mind body spirit and maintained that what
people feel, believe, and think affects their physical capabilities and vice
versa.
Wellness and Holistic Health
The wellness and holistic health movement of the 1970s evolved
outside the traditional health professions.
Major threads throughout the
movement continue today to reflect the integration of body, mind, and spirit;
the ethic of self-responsibility and choice; and the interdependence of
individual, social, and environmental wellness originally conceptualized.
In
fact, these ideas have become increasingly relevant in the scientific community
as advances in biological sciences have evolved to support the relationships
among these threads.
Use of Term Wellness in Health Care Providers and Layman
The terms as well have become popularized and used by lay persons
and health professionals alike, often without a clear conceptual understanding
of what the concepts really mean.
Today thousands of web sites and articles in
the professional and lay literature use the term wellness without a clear
understanding of what it means.
Further, the dichotomy between the
characteristics of the medical model and the wellness model creates dissonance
and makes the use of wellness language inaccurate and confusing in the context
of a medically driven system of illness care.
Model of Health and Wellness
Smith (1983) described distinctive models of health, which include
a clinical orientation, a role performance or functional definition of health, an
eudemonistic definition of health as exuberant well-being, and an adaptive
definition of health.
The Laffrey Health Conception Scale (Laffrey, 1986) based
on Smith’s work was developed to measure the perception of health held by
individuals. The original Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile, the work of
Walker, Sechrist, and Pender (1987), provided a seminal work in this area.