Wellness Concept in Health Care

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

     Wellness is an integrated method of functioning directed toward 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.