Communities and Healthcare: Opening the Dialogue Course

Communities and Healthcare: Opening the Dialogue
Harnessing Complexity and Relationship-centered Care to Improve Health

November 1-2, 2007
Pier 5 at Harbor Club
Baltimore, MD

View the e-brochure(373K PDF)

The changing relationship between communities and their healthcare organizations and professionals holds great promise for the meaningful transformation of healthcare. To develop innovative approaches to promoting health and well-being, we need new and deeper understandings of both individuals-the nature of mind, what motivates us, how our patterns of thinking and behaving form and evolve-and communities-how individuals live together in societies, and the nature of our interdependence. Complexity science, Relationship-centered Care and other theoretical frameworks offer useful new insights in these areas.

This program aims to enhance the engagement of individuals and communities as partners in creating their own health and cultivating healthy communities. Through learning sessions on mindfulness, dialogue skills, complexity science and Relationship-centered Care supplemented by firsthand experience of health systems-community dialogue, participants will develop valuable knowledge, skills and tools to help them foster change in their own communities. The program faculty will include people with expertise in community health issues, complexity science and Relationship-centered Care. Participants will include community members and health care workers, educators and researchers from many disciplines. There will be ample opportunity for participants and faculty to interact in order to:

Explore individual and collective values, beliefs, and experiences about health and healthcare.

Discover key elements and core strategies that support the emergence of health at both the individual and community level.

Learn to apply principles of mindfulness, complexity science, Relationship-centered Care and social networking in fostering community dialogues about health and care.

Create specific action plans and strategies to stimulate change at a local, community, and/or organizational level that can contribute to an epidemic of health and the transformation of healthcare.

Sponsored by Plexus Institute, the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare and the National Academies of Practice

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