The Holistic Health and Wellbeing Group believes that a person-centred, person-empowered approach to health care best facilitates healing by improving coping mechanisms and increasing self esteem.

With this in mind the main goal is to work through the Holistic Health Clinic (HHC) within communities in Gateshead encouraging the right to a personal approach and a positive relationship with other sufferers and Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) practitioners with a view to increased maintenance of wellbeing.

HHC has an emphasis on self-management and self-care, supporting and empowering people to take an active role in their own care so they can exercise more control over their own health and their environments, and make choices conducive to health. Patients are able to remain an active participant in their care seeing themselves as being a part of the healing experience and not merely as consumers of healthcare expecting a cure. This active participation reduces patient worry about their state of health with crucial importance placed upon wellbeing and education as the foundation of commitment to helping themselves improve their condition

In accordance with suggestions in the keynote speech given by HRH Prince of Wales to the World Health Assembly ; HHC objectives incorporate active peer group participation with patients sharing successful illness prevention and management experience, thus bringing a communal commitment toward physical and emotional wellbeing within the community.

“Poor health does not exist in isolation, but is in fact a direct consequence of our lifestyle, our cultures, our communities and how we interact with our environments. The state of our health reflects the food we eat, the exercise we take, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the quality of our housing and sanitation. It even extends to social circumstances – the need to belong to a community, the need for meaningful work and daily purpose. Building this perspective into how we deal with chronic illness is the starting point for changing millions of people’s lives”

Individual holistic assessment takes into account the effects of lifestyle, environment and emotional wellbeing on health.

Patients are encouraged to meet at HHC in an educational 'health and wellbeing' peer group with others identified as experiencing the same or similar symptoms. Patients are able to explore their illness safely with their peers to better understand their condition and the trigger factors that could have made them unwell, this educates through discovering and integrating some of the knowledge and well tried practices of others suffering with similar long term chronic illness.

Finding better ways for patients to prevent and manage illness gives the means and hope of contributing to their own healing, not only improving the lives of sufferers but also creating significant social and economic benefit. Being active participants in health care is important to patients where the need is to regain some sense of control over the quality of their care. Thus HHC provides the human element which can be difficult to achieve in modern conventional medicine, where it is the disease rather than the patient that is treated.

Recognising patients as valued partners in the therapeutic relationship with informed choices over their health care options, addresses gaps in the effectiveness of conventional medicinal approaches regarding conditions that have high economic burden and may help to modify patient demand on existing healthcare services.

A further objective of HHC is to support individuals alongside education by offering CAM therapeutic treatments. Treatments incorporate peer group education as a vital component, with the addition of CAM therapeutic treatments via qualified therapists.

CAM practitioners associated with HHC as advisors and providers of care meet together and share holistic assessment notes with a view to agreeing an appropriate package of CAM care tailored to meet the needs of individual patients and complement their journey towards a greater sense of wellbeing.

The present weighting towards private delivery of CAM tends to disadvantage patients from more deprived social groups. Arguably these groups are more in need of CAM as they tend to present more complex, chronic conditions than the average patient.

The form of health care proposed by HHC serves to decrease the gap in inequalities between those who can afford to pay for treatments and those who cannot by placing importance on providing CAM at the primary care level to patients regardless of socio-economic status.

Integration of CAM into mainstream conventional medicine is a hotly debated issue at present and HHC believes that the form of healthcare it proposes can take advantage of growth within this area by being able to contribute to this integration at a grass roots level. Much importance has been placed upon research needed before integration is achieved.

With this in mind HHC measures patient health outcomes by utilising ‘Measure Yourself Medical Outcome Profile’ (MYMOP) research forms during ongoing holistic assessments. MYMOP evaluation not only serves as an invaluable tool contributing to research on the integration of CAM provision but also acts as a specific measure of patient satisfaction with the scheme.

The aim of the project is to allow access to peer support and CAM therapies for all people in deprived areas of Gateshead where many of the patients live on benefits in council housing or temporary accommodation and have low educational attainment.