There are large benefits of the whole person care approach: Moreover, VA’s own employees reported higher engagement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation, yielding reduced turnover and burnout. Whole health patients also reported greater improvement in perceptions of care, engagement in care and self-care, life meaning and purpose, pain, and perceived stress. The VA’s “Whole Health” model yielded a reduction of 23% to 38% in opioid use, compared to 11% with conventional care alone. Thus, the approach goes to the root causes of their ills and seeks to assist them with long-term solutions. It starts with finding out what matters to the person and then exploring the determinants of health and healing that are most pertinent to them. It explores the social and economic circumstances of the patient and assists them in helping with those. It uses approaches such as health coaching, group visits, nutritional counseling, acupuncture, yoga, meditation, therapeutic massage, stress reduction, and other non-drug approaches for healing. Whole-person care combines conventional medicine, non-drug treatments, and evidence-based complementary modalities to promote self-care. In their four-year pilot program with 130,000 veterans at 18 sites, the VA not only reported improved outcomes and patient experience ratings, but also a significant savings of 20 percent, or more than $4,500 annually per veteran. For example, the Veterans Administration has documented the remarkable success of a new care model that shifts from a traditional disease-based transactional system to a team-based, person-centered care model that addresses patients’ physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. This approach allows these institutions to achieve the elusive “quadruple aim” of reducing costs while also improving population health, the patient experience, and even the wellbeing of clinicians. In our new report, The Case for Delivering Whole-Person Care, the Family Medicine Education Consortium and the Samueli Foundation funded the study of numerous real-world examples of health systems, hospitals, and clinics which are currently practicing “whole-person” care. The good news is that we already have access to a better path to lifelong health and wellbeing. These are emotional and mental health, behavioral and lifestyle factors, and the social and economic environment in which a person lives. Nearly 80% comes from other factors rarely addressed by our system. Numerous studies show that medical treatment itself accounts for only about 20% of health. But the truth is that our system is simply not designed to keep us healthy. Our nation is among the most highly advanced when it comes to treating acute illness by delivering pills and procedures.
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