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Use in Hospital Employee Wellness Program
"The Wellness Inventory is the fundamental component to our hospital's 7-Step Health and Wellness program. Dr. John Travis’ 12 key dimensions of wellness create a holistic foundation from which our clients not only explore the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual issues of life, but more importantly discover ways in which to become responsible for their own health."
Use in Government Agency Employee Wellness Program
Use in Retreat Setting
We recently utilized the Wellness Inventory with participants in our annual Living in Joy, Passion and Purpose Health and Wellness Spa Retreat. We held our retreat at Rancho LaPuerta in Mexico, which was the perfect setting for transforming the energy needed to take the necessary steps for greater health and wellness. Our participants found the Wellness Inventory to be a powerful tool for increasing their awareness about the strengths and challenges in their wellness behaviors. It also really helped them to focus, by providing information about which behaviors they were clearly motivated to change.
Our clients loved the Wellness Inventory and left the retreat with the first steps of their action plan for increased wellness. The program will follow them home with email reminders and opportunities to take the Inventory again and update their plans. The Wellness Inventory worked so well that we have decided to use it with participants as a part of our annual spa retreat.
I am the owner of a wellness consulting business, Great To Be Alive, and began working with the local department of social services in the fall of 2005 and, as a result of the positive outcomes they experienced, have continued providing wellness consulting for 16 months to date. (The director of this agency saw this as a priority to save healthcare insurance dollars for the department and funded it through the department supervisory training and development budget.)
This program was designed originally for the supervisory group of 8 and was initiated with the Wellness Inventory. The inventory was used to identify the primary areas of wellness that were priorities for each individual. The program consisted of an "introduction to wellness" overview group session followed by individuals completing the inventory, and meeting with me for one-to-one wellness consulting and individual plan development. I met with individuals monthly for wellness coaching and did weekly wellness plan accountability check-in sessions by phone as well as assigning buddies for accountability check ins. In addition, there were monthly group sessions that focused on three common areas and then branched out into other related wellness topics.
The result was that the entire group had three common areas that needed to be addressed first -- breathing, eating and moving. The staff repeated the Wellness Inventory three times during the first year and were excited to see changes in all 12 areas. The design of the inventory graphics made it easy to recognize improvements.
I used the Wellness Workbook by John Travis, MD, as my guide for the group sessions, adding information from my own experience with wellness in these areas - including Brain Gym movements and breathing exercises, basic nutritional information and use of rebounding for movement. The work that this department does is extremely stressful and this was compounded by increased workload when the Katrina disaster occurred and families were relocated to our area from New Orleans. Several staff stated that they would not have been able to cope without getting ill if it had not been for their wellness plan being firmly in place.
The supervisors were so pleased with their results that several created mini-programs for their staff which included completion of the Wellness Inventory and one Planning Session with me followed by buddy check-Ins with co-workers.
There were significant results realized from the work with the wellness program including, but not limited to the following:
I plan to use this model to offer these services to other agencies and businesses in my area.
For information on licensing the Wellness Inventory for your organization, please contact:
James Strohecker
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