Integrative Health and Wellness

How do people live well and what does it involve? How do individuals make sense of the various ideas and theories related to promoting & sustaining wellness? While our sciences help us understand what is health, they do not so much help us understand the human behavioral processes that underlie health and wellness behaviors and the change process. Integrative health and wellness is defined as the combination of complimentary and conventional health approaches in a coordinated manner. This certificate program provides students with an opportunity to learn about behavioral processes that activate and integrate the process of living wellness.

Healthcare professionals are first humans who often struggle with the same questions their patients do, so it is beneficial that healthcare professionals understand experientially the lived experience of integrating wellness. This program straddles both the personal and professional aspects of integrative wellness. Research has revealed that living well is deliberate creation of health behaviors that unfold through a process involving three stages of behavioral development. Those stages include Awakening a Vision of Wellness, Integrating Strategies, and Living Wellness. Students will study and progress through these stages while participating in this certificate program.

The Integrative Health and Wellness Certificate prepares students with the foundational skills to understand the behavioral process for implementing long-term health and wellness goals that sustain life-changing behaviors.

Certificate Program consists of the 5 courses outlined below:

Cultivating Resilience & Community Recovery
Recovery and Resilience address behaviors associated with poor lifestyle choices and structures and employs education and practice in recovery and resilience factors. Students will learn about recovery principles and resilience factors, along with having the opportunity to apply learning to real-life challenges. Prerequisites for this course are Stress Management, Learning Processes in Health Behavior and Strategies in Wellness.

Learning Processes in Health Behavior
Learning Processes in Health Behavior provides nursing and other health science professionals with an in-depth study of behavioral change processes for understanding how individuals create wellness in their lives toward sustained well-being. Few academic courses that explore the underlying process of change as it pertains to cultivating resilience and well-being exist today, yet a high demand for a lifestyle that curates well-being exists. Anyone working in the health and wellness field, in any capacity, should be aware of important behavioral change processes that aim at improving health and well-being for the professional health worker or for the people the health worker serves. This class juxtaposes empirical theories with experiential activity and reflection so that students have an opportunity to embody the core lessons of this course. This is a prerequisite course for Strategies In Wellness and Living Wellness & Leadership.

Living Wellness and Leadership
Living Wellness & Leadership signals a shift from discovering and integrating a wellness lifestyle into one’s life, towards developing mastery in living wellness and expressing forms of natural leadership as a result of developing mastery. The culmination of knowledge, skills, and behaviors transcends skill development, resulting in an expression of leadership. In this course, students will examine personal responsibility, professional roles, maintaining personal integrity, mentoring and guiding others through learning about the five primary behaviors that characterize living wellness. Living Wellness & Leadership is the capstone course in the Integrative Wellness certificate program. All other courses in the program must be completed before a student enters this course.

Strategies in Wellness
Strategies In Wellness offers students an opportunity to systematically implement lifestyle structures which support the vision of wellness uncovered in the prerequisite course Learning Processes in Health Behavior. Specifically, students will learn how to create lifestyle structures that enable personal interests, needs, preferences, and wellness values to be included in the building of their personal lifestyle structure for wellness. This course is primarily experiential in nature and students will be encouraged to utilize peer interaction to build support, and share and gain ideas for implementation. Strategies In Wellness offers students an opportunity to systematically implement lifestyle structures which support the vision of wellness uncovered in the prerequisite course PSY 320 Learning Processes in Health Behavior. Specifically, students will learn how to create lifestyle structures that enable personal interests, needs, preferences, and wellness values to be included in the building of their personal lifestyle structure for wellness. This course is primarily experiential in nature and students will be encouraged to utilize peer interaction to build support, and share and gain ideas for implementation.

Stress Management
Stress is one of the greatest factors in determining a person’s sense of health and wellbeing, and uncontrolled stress can cause numerous conditions that lead people to seek professional care. Students will learn to identify the causes and symptoms of stress and how to effectively manage the body and mind together to reduce pathologies impacted by unmanaged stress. This course is the first required course in the Integrative Wellness certificate program. Stress is one of the greatest factors in determining a person’s sense of health and wellbeing, and uncontrolled stress can cause numerous conditions that lead people to seek professional care. Students will learn to identify the causes and symptoms of stress and how to effectively manage the body and mind together to reduce pathologies impacted by unmanaged stress. This course is the first required course in the Integrative Wellness certificate program.

Integrative Nutrition

Integrative Nutrition involves dynamic and comprehensive knowledge and skill in nourishing oneself well. By understanding the principles of nutrition, the gut and brain connection- interaction relationship, and possessing the skills to nourish oneself properly individuals are able to support themselves and their families for optimal health and wellbeing. Nutrition plays a significant role in personal change and wellbeing and cannot be disregarded in its value in healthy living. Learn the secrets of intuitive eating and start building a new relationship with your body as you participate in this program.

Certificate Program consists of the 5 courses outlined below:

Culinary Medicine
Get into the kitchen and explore how food and cooking relate to your personal health and wellbeing. This Culinary Medicine course blends the art of cooking with the science of medicine, offering you simple approaches to understanding and applying the dynamics of food and food preparation to your wellness repertoire.

Eating Psychology
In a diet crazed world, it can prove more and more challenging to make the right choices for your unique self. In this course you will go on a journey of self-understanding, exploring the psychology of eating and how it applies to your life. We will touch on the intricacies of nutrition, food habits, food ethics, and the habit-building effects of emotional eating. This course will help you have a much more balanced relationship with food and consequently, a healthier body and mind, allowing you to ditch the diet mentality for good.

Introduction to Nutrition and Health
This course is designed to introduce the basic principles of nutrition and teach students how to care for themselves and assist their clients in understanding how diet affects their health and wellbeing. Students will also learn how to protect and maintain their own health and wellness from possible injuries and illnesses that especially pertain to the healthcare practitioner.

Mind Over Mealtime-Nutrition and Mental Health
Your food choices can positively or negatively impact your mood, your emotions, your patterns of sleep, and even your cognitive focus. This course provides an overview of foods that can make or break your mental health. You’ll explore strategies for creating better health habits and making small, incremental changes that last.

Your Glorious Gut – Introduction to the Human Microbiome
Your gut microbiome is made up of around 100 trillion microorganisms. Those microorganisms can be friend or foe depending on how you cultivate your relationship with them. In this course, you will explore your own belly-body connection; learning how to listen and respond to the needs of your microbiome. You will learn how a disrupted microbiome can lead to chronic illnesses and mood imbalances and you will learn how to heal your gut and improve your health and well-being.

Interprofessional Team Leadership for Allied Health Professionals

This program has been developed to meet the rising demand for interprofessional leadership and collaboration within the healthcare setting. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the critical necessity for professionals with the requisite competencies that enable them to “cooperate, collaborate, communicate, and integrate” effectively in acute response situations.

Additionally, several recent studies have corroborated the WHO’s call by demonstrating highly efficient and effective, execution of coordinated and pre-planned patient centered, interprofessional health care management during acute situation response. Acute Response situations include but are not limited to violence prevention and mitigation, mass casualty emergency response, and disaster preparedness.

Identified core competencies include interprofessional teamwork, leadership, communication, ethics, and roles and responsibilities for collaborative practice. This certificate program has been developed to meet and exceed the basic identified competencies for interprofessional response. Upon completion of this program individuals will be prepared to coordinate interprofessional collaboration and response in the healthcare setting.

Certificate Program consists of the 5 courses outlined below:

Foundations of Leadership

Understanding, evaluating, and exercising effective leadership requires attention to collaboration, social influence, and persuasion. In this course students will explore the core concepts and qualities of effective collaborative leadership and team building. Identifying what works when potential leaders are able to successfully facilitate guidance and team development and what goes wrong when potential leaders lack any ability to command the attention, respect, or effort of others.

This course examines principles of building highly effective teams by analyzing the variety of interrelated practices underlying group dynamics. Students will combine learning through hands-on situations and contemporaneous experiences in a team-based exercise. Leadership is not a solo activity. Leadership only happens through others. Emergent leaders commonly begin with

leading in the team sphere. Leading teams involves managing different personalities, cultures, conflicting political agendas, and varying skill levels while simultaneously securing resources and managing expectations of senior executives or other stakeholders internal or external to the organization

Interprofessional Communication
This course explores the dynamics of interprofessional communication, which includes engaging diverse professionals who compliment one another’s professional expertise, and associated resources, and additionally aids in the development of strategies to meet the health and healthcare needs of patients and populations. Students will first build a foundation for study by looking at the principal tools and skills of interprofessional communication. The second half of the course focuses on the core of interprofessional communication, namely, clear communication regarding each team member’s roles and responsibilities in executing components of a treatment plan or public health intervention. Students will explore more complex dynamics of interprofessional communication such as difficulty and crisis, communication climates, and interpersonal conflict.

Interprofessional Team and Group Dynamics
This course is designed to familiarize the student with the dynamics of group and team development and cohesion. Students will explore the practical application of collaborative roles and responsibilities within healthcare settings.

Social Competence in the Workplace
As the workplace setting becomes more and more culturally diverse, it is critical for professionals to develop the ability to work effectively within a multicultural framework.
Cultural competence within working relationships provides for more positive and productive outcomes within the workplace.

The intention of this course is to provide students with the ability to cultivate successful working relationships and interactions with individuals and groups from other countries and cultures; either face‐to‐face or in virtual contexts.

Personal and Professional Ethics
The purpose of this course is to provide allied health students with foundational knowledge and skills required for ethical personal and professional behavior. Students will learn to competently reflect upon, address and resolve ethical and socio-cultural issues that will inevitably confront during their personal and professional lives.

This interprofessional ethics course involves exploring basic knowledge and skills in ethical theory and reasoning, professional ethics, interprofessional approach to health care decision-making, goals of health care, illness experience, and other topics of concern. In addition to personal exploration, students will have an opportunity to practice communication, reflection, listening, and reasoning in the moral and ethical dimensions of health care in order to deliver effective health services within an ethical framework.

Plant Medicine

Plants heal and restore our bodies, balance our emotions, and revitalize our spirits. Our certificate program in Plant Medicine will guide students in developing knowledge and skill utilizing the most effective and therapeutic plants while gaining a deeper understanding of how to use and prepare common plants. This will include harvesting, processing, and storing herbs for personal use. Additionally, students will develop skill in making formulations of basic decoctions, infusions, personal care products and using culinary herbs for improving the taste and health benefit of foods.

Certificate Program consists of the 5 courses outlined below:

Culinary Medicine
Get into the kitchen and explore how food and cooking relate to your personal health and wellbeing. This Culinary Medicine course blends the art of cooking with the science of medicine, offering you simple approaches to understanding and applying the dynamics of food and food preparation to your wellness repertoire.

Global Remedies
For millennium humankind has looked to the natural world for health and well-being. Modern living has simultaneously distanced us from our roots to natural wellness and increased our experience of lifestyle related discomfort and disease. In some parts of the world, cultural and traditional approaches to health are alive and well. This course explores interventions for wellness from a variety of traditional medicine systems around the world. We will explore simple remedies from Ayurveda, Traditional Asian Medicine, and other systems that use food, herbs, and spices, and more for therapeutic pick me ups for the body, mind, and spirit

Introduction to Herbal Medicine
This introductory course is for people with little or no herbal experience who want to explore the world of herbs and herbal remedies. This course will introduce you to some of the tried and true herb companions, as well as create a framework for understanding how herbs work and how to select and prepare them for maximum benefit. Get into the kitchen and practice whipping up some herbal teas, tinctures, and body care products.

Medical Herbalism
This course will introduce you to applied skills that can be used not only for everyday life but also as a foundation for continued education in herbal medicine. In this course we will review and discuss 20 different plants and their uses, such as teas, tinctures and body care products. We will also cover safety considerations, understanding how to recognize herbal quality and the sustainability of medicinal plants. This course will introduce you to applied skills that can be used not only for everyday life but also as a foundation for continued education in herbal medicine. In this course we will review and discuss 20 different plants and their uses, such as teas, tinctures and body care products. We will also cover safety considerations, understanding how to recognize herbal quality and the sustainability of medicinal plants.

Plant Medicine Basics
Medicinal plants are the foundation of traditional medicine around the world. 3.3 billion people in the world utilize plant medicine on a regular basis to maintain their health and well-being. This course explores the tradition of plant medicine, recognizing that plants have physical and spiritual properties that can assist in our efforts to be well. In this course you will have the opportunity to discover new ways of relating to the plants in your environment as well as learn about other plant companions from around the world.

Virtual Health

Virtual Health, also referred to as telehealth and digital health is the future of health care delivery – and the future is here now! You can no longer put it off.

Virtual health utilizes the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to broaden access to healthcare to rural and under-served areas, to meet the demands of the aging population, to increase efficiency while reducing costs, and to enhance patient safety, quality of care, patient satisfaction, and patient outcomes.

As telehealth continues to expand, there is an emerging need for trained, skilled professionals who will efficiently and effectively deliver telehealth services.

This certificate program will provide training and skills for you to confidently coordinate virtual encounters with patients.

Certificate Program consists of the 5 courses outlined below:

Introduction to Virtual Health
Virtual health refers to the use of technology to deliver health services in a way that is independent of time or location. Students will explore the use of video, mobile apps, text-based messaging, sensors, and social platforms as a means of supporting optimal patient-centered care and information.

The emphasis of learning will be to investigate ways in which technology can be utilized to bridge healthcare disciplines and provide a cohesive interprofessional dynamic in service of the patient and healthcare community. Students will also explore how the inclusion of virtual technology within a health care environment impacts information privacy and security standards as well as the legal and ethical considerations.

Developing Digital Presence
This course provides students with a skill set specific to the delivery of health care and healthcare education via technology. Students will explore a variety of means for delivery of virtual health communications and considerations necessary for optimal encounters. In essence, participants in this course will learn about “Stage presence” —the ability to connect powerfully and authentically with an audience— for the virtual healthcare environment. This course material includes audio, visual, spoken, and written delivery of health information, practicing and refining presentations that promote positive patient and professional encounters and outcomes when utilizing virtual platforms for delivery of care and information.

Health Literacy and Education
Health literacy is defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” In this course students will explore the use of technology to develop and deliver information intended to increase patient and professional health literacy. Students will explore methods of training fellow health care staff in the principles of health literacy and plain language. Create sample collections or repositories of materials intended to increase health literacy within identified demographics and find ways to assist with dissemination of existing communication tools and resources for patient/public education.

Dynamic Communication
Communication within the healthcare setting can be fast-paced and require multiple means of delivery. In this course students will practice and apply strategies for maintaining dynamic and effective communication in any situation within the healthcare environment. Students will explore public speaking, emergency communication, and other elements of fast-paced effective reception and delivery of information.

Healthcare Ethics
This course examines issues that can arise in modern healthcare environments, especially as they relate to the use of technology and interprofessional team dynamics.

Workplace Violence Prevention and Management

Workplace violence is a rare situation but can be prevented by taking certain measures to ensure your workplace is non-violent or that appropriate types and levels of response occur when needed. Improvised response to workplace violence can have disastrous results. Make sure your company and workforce are able to respond proactively and accurately to violence so you can prevent violence or respond quickly in the event of a violent incident and minimize the possibility if causalities. If you can save a life—or many—the return on investment is significant.

Certificate Program consists of the 5 courses outlined below:

Action Awareness Violence Prevention
This course provides a multidisciplinary overview of the identification and management of situations/events within the continuum of violence that can occur on campus, in the workplace, and other public spaces. Students will learn how to recognize, report and defuse situations involving campus/workplace bullying, harassment, and violence. Additionally, this course will provide guidelines for cultivating situational awareness and risk assessment in order to mitigate or effectively respond in the event of extreme violence. Survival strategies, basic first aid, and practices for cultivating resilience are also part of this course.

Dynamic Communication
This course explores the dynamics of interprofessional communication, which includes engaging diverse professionals who compliment one another’s professional expertise, and associated resources, and additionally aids in the development of strategies to meet the health and healthcare needs of patients and populations. Students will first build a foundation for study by looking at the principal tools and skills of interprofessional communication. The second half of the course focuses on the core of interprofessional communication, namely, clear communication regarding each team member’s roles and responsibilities in executing components of a treatment plan or public health intervention. Students will explore more complex dynamics of interprofessional communication such as difficulty and crisis, communication climates, and interpersonal conflict.

Interprofessional Team Leadership for Active Response
Students will explore the core competencies required for cultivating dynamic leadership capacities for workplace violence prevention through the development of collaborative leadership and multidisciplinary team participation. Students will learn to conduct evidence-based threat assessments and develop management practices involving communicating safety plans and ongoing evaluation of program effectiveness.

Introduction to Public Health and Emergency Preparedness
Students will explore the core competencies required for cultivating safety in the healthcare workplace through the development of collaborative leadership and multidisciplinary team participation. Students will learn to conduct evidence-based threat assessments and develop management practices involving communicating safety plans and ongoing evaluation of program effectiveness.

Uncovering Your Moral Compass: Personal and Professional Ethics
The purpose of this course is to provide allied health students with foundational knowledge and skills required for ethical personal and professional behavior. Students will learn to competently reflect upon, address and resolve ethical and socio-cultural issues that will inevitably confront during their personal and professional lives. This interprofessional ethics course involves exploring basic knowledge and skills in ethical theory and reasoning, professional ethics, interprofessional approach to health care decision-making, goals of health care, illness experience, and other topics of concern. In addition to personal exploration, students will have an opportunity to practice communication, reflection, listening, and reasoning in the moral and ethical dimensions of health care in order to deliver effective health services within an ethical framework.