Prevention; Wellness Practices In A 21st Century

PREVENTION & WELLNESS PRACTICES IN A 21ST CENTURY

ENVIRONMENT; WHAT WE HAVE & WHAT WE NEED

Frank G. Magourilos, MPS, CPS, ICPSFebruary 24, 2012

Big Picture—• Prevention science has advanced faster than our

ability to disseminate, fund, and implement prevention.

• Effective long-term prevention approaches must include a Systems Thinking Construct.

• Prevention & Wellness has to always include the Individual & their Environment.

Big Picture—

• Professional Workforce Development is paramount to the future success of prevention as a scientific field.

• A Systems Thinking, Coordinated Planning, that includes Federal, State, and Local Governments in partnerships with all the National, State, and Local Private and Non-Profit Sectors, is the best way to have population level change.

Evidence-based prevention characteristics—

The field of prevention is immersed in a disciplinary approach that utilizes many theories and models from many other sciences such as; psychology, sociology, public health, and environmental sciences.

Systems thinking; how other systems influence prevention—

• Systems thinking is the process by which we attempt to expose the conditions supporting the problem or symptom rather than merely reacting to it.

• It is far easier to get caught in the reactive trap of addressing symptoms when one is focused on a small part without the context of the bigger picture.

• Rather than breaking a problem into small pieces, arguably it is more useful to study the entire problem or prospect.

• All these systems are open, perpetually changing, and interconnected; every time anything is changed at any one system it affects all the other systems.

PREVENTION LANDSCAPE NEEDS A PARADIGM SHIFT—

• Flavor of the month approaches—we have the tendency of collectively over reacting to any new trend that comes along without strategically thinking the impact funding and other resources would have by diverting from one area of prevention

• Coordinated Statewide Prevention—we need Statewide prevention coordination that will largely eliminate political agendas, unwarranted interference, and individual power plays at the local level. If there is to be a systems wide prevention integration approach, federal and state coordination is absolutely critical.

Prevention and systems integration—• The National Prevention StrategyLEADERSHIP:• 17 Heads of departments, agencies, and

offices across the Federal government.• The National Prevention, Health Promotion,

and Public Health Council.NM LEADERSHIP• NMPN-PA-NMIPC-NMCBBHP-• BHSD-DOH-DFA-CYFD-NMBHC-

PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT—

Arguably, this is the most important area that needs to be addressed and brought forth to individual and community needs of the 21st century.

• Inadequate knowledge and expertise of the competencies the workforce needs to meet current and future challenges.

EXISTING BARRIERS

• Lack in Identifying, Classifying, and Enumerating the Public Health Prevention Workforce.

• Lack of clear, concise, public health prevention profession classification categories.

• An absence of consistent public health professional credentialing requirements.

• A lack of a professional workforce education and expertise in advance specialization areas and disciplines.

PROFESSIONAL WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT—

• More critically, recent findings have exposed that today’s members of the prevention workforce regularly struggle with the ambiguity of the rules, regulations, standards, and procedures that manage service delivery, and which sometimes conflict with one another. These rules may also not be grounded in an evidence base.

• Members of the workforce have repeatedly described their low morale and low levels of commitment to their organization and to the field because of low pay, the absence of career ladders, excessive workloads, tenuous job security, and an inability to influence the organization or system in which they are working.

WORKFORCE POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS—

We need to expand the current workforce capacity by utilizing a system or a number of strategies that allow for a very broad-base empirical prevention knowledge base across multiple disciplines. One way of accomplishing this would be to infuse prevention core principles into existing curricula for teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and other human services professionals. This would allow new professionals entering these fields to be equipped to utilize evidence-based prevention practices into their sphere of influence.

WORKFORCE POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS—

There are also numerous prospects for increasing the knowledge base of the existing human services workforce. Professional associations of teachers, school administrators, social workers, nurses, doctors, psychologists, child welfare administrators, juvenile justice administrators, and the public health field as well, can include information on evidence-based prevention practices within their national conferences and continuing education training courses.

CULTIVATE AND MULTIPLY PREVENTION RELATED PARTNERSHIPS AND COALITIONS—

• A critical part of workforce development and expansion needs to come from outside the normal boundaries of the behavioral health field. There are simply not sufficient financial and human resources to address such a complex problem as adverse human behaviors and the environmental factors involved by simply doing what the current prevention field has been doing

• Having said this, the solution is imbedded in the simple premise that health and wellness, including behavioral health, is in the best interest of everyone and every sector of our social environment. Promoting prevention and wellness initiatives are attractive because they impact all aspects of societal functioning.

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