Health Leadership & Facilitation

Today’s health care culture is beginning to change. There is greater recognition of the value of a partnership-oriented health care system and the importance of empowerment, hope, and self-determination as keys to recovery. There is an increasing understanding that the current emphasis on expert knowledge is detrimental to the healing process.

The concept of Medical Facilitation (open a more extensive description of this concept by clicking on the link) addresses the need to partner with consumers and assist them in processing all aspects of their health process: physical, emotional, spiritual and social.

Given the growing complexity of the health care system, and the difficulty consumers experience navigating it, the need for new facilitative leadership roles is emerging. Peer leaders and medical facilitators are needed to assist individual consumers and communities to advocate for their own health and facilitate the successful achievement of treatment goals and expectations. Health care professionals who are currently trained in recognizing and treating disease would gain from developing skills in facilitating complex relationships and incorporating consumers’ beliefs and expectations in treatment approaches. Process Work offers a range of conceptual and practical tools that serve to increase facilitative abilities.

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Social and political processes of rank and privilege have been shown to correlate with the frequency and severity of body symptoms.

• The more rank a person has, the better her chances of staying healthy.
• There is an individual process of adjusting to mainstream norms and a community process in which possessing rank and privilege influences the ability to stay healthy.
• Internalized cultural norms and the lived socio-cultural dynamics of the isms (age, sex, race, etc.) have a direct impact on our bodies.

A consequence of the above is that symptom work includes work with individuals, relationships and world issues.

• While working with an individual we need an awareness of the process of modernization and an awareness of cultural dynamics as being relevant to any symptom work.
• So, for example, if we're working with a person of lower rank, there's a feeling difference between that work and working with a person of higher rank.
• We may work with them in a similar way but it's important to have an awareness of the difference and how that plays out in their stories and how they and we, working with them, interpret those stories.
  

Medical Facilitation sees itself as an initial step towards a new culture of dialogue and communication in health care that will help facilitate a co-creative project of reshaping our health care and the values it represents. It is an essential new element that hopefully will give rise to increasing satisfaction, lower costs and reduce inequalities in health care.