Workshop 1 - Inspiring health movements in community networks: Community network innovations
Dr. Rick Botelho, Family physician and U Rochester School of Medicine
Challenge: How can we mobilize people within their local and extended social networks to socialize health learning and experience to improve population health in the community?
Description: We address the problem of community health through the approach known as catalytic innovation, creating lightweight modes of peer learning appropriate for different types of social networks (online, neighborhood, community centres). To overcome the scarcity mindset in healthcare, patients become an integral solution to these complex problems. These peer-driven services complement professional services and build growing networks of peer learning and coaching for health improvement.
The Health Coaching Buddies learning process developed by Dr. Botelho represents such a convenient, inexpensive and accessible peer learning system. These processes aim to improve health behaviors such as self-care of chronic diseases, improving health literacy, reducing social isolation and enhancing personal happiness and social well-being. These innovations can be made widely available, using social media, online programs and mobile phones. They are designed to create meaningful learning experiences that aim to accommodate people’s particular worldviews, needs, preferences and life circumstances, instead of making people fit into a particular program, theory, clinical approach or setting.