Optimal Care through Integrative Healing
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Optimal Care through Integrative Healing©
The goal of Nurse Navigators 4 Integrative Healing is to bring an integrative healthcare approach to the Upstate of South Carolina. In order to integrate traditional healing practices with today’s Western/ conventional medicine, it is our experience that healthcare professionals must receive information that can facilitate a paradigm shift in perception, values, and assumptions about wellness and self-care.
To meet this goal, Nurse Navigators 4 Integrative Healing developed an 8 session course entitled Optimal Care through Integrative Healing. This course was introduced to Greenville Health Systems (GHS) in Fall 2013 and repeated in Spring 2014 to staff of the Center for Integrative Oncology and Survivorship (CIOS) through a grant from the GHS Office of Philanthropy and Partnership. Each 2 hour session provided both didactic and experiential training.
Content areas for our course include:
- Introduction to general Complementary/Alternative concepts, principles, assumptions
- Discussion of the mind-body connection
- Introduction to the concept of energy and its relationship to health/illness
- Exploration of Whole Medical Systems:Homeopathy, Naturopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda
- Experience of Mind-Body Medicine:Meditation, Relaxation, Guided Imagery, Hypnotherapy, Biofeedback, Prayer, Yoga, Tai Chi
- Discussion ofHerbs, Supplements, and Aromatherapy
- Experience and exploration of Manipulative and Body-based practices:Chiropractic, Massage, Cranial Sacral Therapy, Yoga, Tai Chi, other movement therapies
- Discussion of Energy Medicine: Qi Gong, Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Bio-electromagnetics
- Exploration of spirituality, beliefs, intuition, and self-care
- Experience of Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT)
As a final project in the Optimal Care through Integrative Healing program all participants created an action plan for the implementation of one or more integrative modalities within their specific patient care setting. They identified: the modality to be used, its benefits, potential obstacles to integrating, a time-line, and responsible persons to ensure continuity and to maintain momentum. Quality indicators were identified to be monitored for the support of evidenced-based research.
In addition to facilitating the desired paradigm shifts in thinking, Optimal Care through Integrative Healing inspired staff to make changes on their units. Further, participants benefitted personally, as well as professionally, from the course as some of their comments indicate:
“What an awesome opportunity to learn about those methods of integrative healing! I hope that we will be able to incorporate a few of them in the pediatric setting.”
“Very well put together and presented. Wonderful teaching and learning experience!”
“I greatly enjoyed this course. I have learned some new techniques and knowledge that will
benefit me personally and my patients. Excellent! Thank-you for presenting this!”
“These classes were refreshing and interesting; continue offering them to oncology staff. I will have a sense of healing power to help myself as well as my patients.”
“Awesome class- new way of thinking to deliver better care to my patients.”
“Thank you so much. I do intend to put my learning to use in my life as well as people I come in contact with. Great job….thanks a million!”
