The Health Care Forum was convened on April 3, 2024. The trigger topic for this forum was a recent best-selling book called Outlive by Peter Attia. This topic was introduced
How can our healthcare leaders build the right new skills to lead healthcare in the future? How is complexity confronted in the world of mid-21st Century health care? What puzzles, problems, dilemmas, polarities and mysteries are revealed in contemporary healthcare and how can we harness these opportunities to continue innovation and transformation in healthcare?
What is the nature and impact of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity in healthcare settings? What type of leader will emerge to effectively navigate a turbulent world that is filled with contradictions and polarities?
Challenges of the Present
Complex Adaptive Systems in Health Care
US health care is a complicated tangle of health care organizations that are influenced by politics, the economy, and evolving public needs. Labeled today a “complex adaptive system”, we want to analyze, simplify and understand how best to improve US health care for the future.
Heading towards Tomorrow
Plans for Changes and Growth in Health Care
Understanding theories and models is key as we try to make sense of what’s happening in today’s health care. Only after we understand these experiences can we determine what they mean for us. We gain insights from case studies shared by our friends in the Salus Forum who have been leaders in different health care systems. We learn from their experiences.
We explore models of illness, disease, and health from the perspective of culture and ethnicity rather than primarily from the now dominant individual perspective. Our models color how we approach disease, illness and health both in planning and critiquing systems of care. They also impact the approach we take to our own health.
The Health Care “Soap Box”: Right Train? Right Track?
Four Cultures of Health Care?
In this section of the forum, we will begin to describe core dynamics that may lie at the heart of health care. We will present a model (The Four Cultures of Health Care) which provides a potential framework for understanding the complexities of contemporary health care systems, and perhaps generates new ideas about how we can come together to heal the people and the system of which we are all a part. To begin this discovery process, we start with what lies at the core of health care: anxiety.
We go on to identify four cultures that we believe emerge in response to the anxiety and operate in contemporary health care systems. The first of these cultures is professionally oriented. Here is a description of this culture and its historical roots:
Health Care, Psychology and Coaching?
Can mid-21st Century health care benefit from a dose of psychology and behavioral medicine? Is there a place for health-based coaching in contemporary health care institution? We proposed that the emerging field of health-based coaching can be of great benefit if it focuses on psychology-informed strategies associated with empowering individuals to make lasting health behavior changes. These changes are the cornerstone in defining a sense of well-being.
The health-based coach can assist their client to bridge the gap between and integrate several different disciplines: psychology, biology, environmental studies, neurobiology and spirituality. Together, these interwoven disciplines provide what might best be called a biopsychosocial perspective on health.
Library One: Recommended Resources
Emerson, Brian and Kelly Lewis, (2019)
Johnson, Barry (1996) Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. HRD Press.
Meadows, Donella (2008) Thinking in Systems. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Miller, John and Scott Page (2007) Complex Adaptive Systems. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Snowden, Dave (2023) Cynefin Framework. Retrieved from: https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/
Stacey, R.D. (1996), Strategic Management & Organisational Dynamics, Pitman, London
Brief Biographies of Salus Forum Members.
The following link provides information on Salus Forum Members.
Jeremy Fish, M.D.
William Bergquist, Ph.D.
Perry Pugno, M.D.
Library Two: Documents Published by Participants in Salus Forum
Christie Lewis, Kendell Munzer and William Bergquist (Editors)
William Bergquist (Editor)/Library of Professional Coaching/Future of Coaching:
Communitas: The Three Cs Newsletter
Gay Teurman, Psy.D. and William Bergquist, Ph.D.
The emerging field of health-based coaching has mostly focused on strategies associated with empowering individuals to make lasting health behavior changes. These changes are
Associations
