Whole Person Health: Visits with Royal Health Awareness Society, International Organization of Migration and Institute for Family Health
“A healthy outside starts from the inside.”
Whole person health involves looking at the whole person and considering multiple factors that promote health. It means empowering individuals, families, communities, and populations to improve their health in multiple interconnected biological, behavioral, social, and environmental areas. Instead of treating a specific disease, whole person health focuses on restoring health, promoting resilience, and preventing issues across a lifespan. Understanding the condition in which a person has lived, addressing behaviors at an early stage, and managing stress can not only prevent multiple diseases but can also help restore health and promote self-care, lifestyle, and behavioral interventions to return to health.
Support of whole person health can be preventative (instead of curative) based on the principle that prevention is the best way to improve wellness and enable communities to live healthy. I learned during my travels in Amman how essential it is to develop awareness materials and tools on relevant health issues that build on best practices yet are adapted and contextualized to suit the targeted communities.
Royal Health Awareness Society, or RHAS, empowers the Jordanian community to adopt a healthy lifestyle through raising health awareness and enhancing an environment conducive to safe and healthy behaviors. RHAS develops and implements public health and safety awareness programs in partnership with the public and private sectors as well as civil society organizations. To learn more about RHAS, visit https://rhas.org.jo.
Institute for Family Health, or IFH, launched by the Noor Al Hussein Foundation in 1986, serves as a national and regional model for comprehensive and progressive healthcare that addresses the physical, mental, and social welfare of Jordanians and refugees. IFH is a holistic community healthcare model that contributes to the wellbeing and resilience of families and individuals throughout their lifecycle by providing integrated prevention, curative, protection, and rehabilitation services that meet the highest professional standards and human-rights principles. To learn more about IFH, visit https://kinghusseinfoundation.org/en/EntityPage/Institute%20for%20Family%20Health/2.
The UN’s International Organization of Migration, or IOM, established a Migration Health Division, which contributes towards the physical, mental and social well-being of migrants, enabling them and host communities to achieve social and economic development. The IOM’s Migration Health Division delivers and promotes comprehensive, preventive and curative health programs which are beneficial, accessible, and equitable for migrants and mobile populations. To learn more about IOM’s Migration Health Division, visit https://www.iom.int/migration-health.
These organizations aim to meet people’ changing needs and improve their access to health knowledge, while building their capacities to enable them to adopt healthy and safe lifestyles. Also, these organizations work to build beneficiaries’ experiences and practical skills so they can be agents of change in their communities, while also strengthening existing systems through knowledge and skills transfer to ensure sustainability of the programs.
Additionally, there is a lot of value in tracking success measures. These organizations have strong monitoring and evaluation systems with well-defined outputs and indicators, supporting their data analysis and dissemination, and informing future decision-making regarding program development and implementation.
Human beings are multi-dimensional - we require whole-person care to nurture the body, mind, and spirit to achieve wellness. Physical health, mental health, behavioral health, social health, and spiritual health should overlap to promote optimal use of diverse, integrated healthcare resources to deliver diverse resources to improve care coordination, well-being, and health outcomes.
“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”
