This article appeared in the Sequim Free Clinic Summer 2021 Newsletter
Over the past six years of our existence as a nonprofit in Clallam County, the Olympic Peninsula Healthy Community Coalition’s (OPHCC) focus has been on decreasing chronic disease rates amongst our citizens. Collaborating together with our over 75 partners from the non-profit, government, education, business and health care fields, we share resources and information to achieve our vision of a healthier county. Our primary focus has been on increasing physical activity opportunities and the availability of healthy food options, both critical in helping to prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer that have the potential to decrease both quality of life and life span.
And then came the Covid-19 pandemic, and with it, a rapidly escalating incidence of behavioral health issues associated with the isolation, fear, instability and change the pandemic has brought with it. In response to these concerns, the OPHCC Board of Directors decided to broaden our focus beyond physical health, to encompass and serve the expanding behavioral health needs seen in our county.
To that end, we’ve been working closely with The Healthy US Collaborative, a non-profit team of national leaders in health, healthcare, filmmaking, and communications to adopt their TakeCare initiative, a whole health-focused campaign addressing the four pillars of whole health: mind, body, spirit and community. OPHCC is the first rural community in the country to invest in this work and will provide important data back to the project on best practices.
Using these four pillars, the TakeCare project seeks to empower individuals to create their own health and well-being through small, simple steps using a story telling model to communicate the strategies. From ideas on connecting with others to mitigate isolation, to how spending time in nature positively influences our well-being, to practice mindfulness and meditation, this model provides us immediate solutions to manage the stress of the pandemic and decrease the resulting depression and anxiety some have experienced.
This past spring, the OPHCC conducted a survey of our partners to determine how we could best serve their needs with this whole health model and received overwhelming support and requests for additional assistance. Physicians need ideas for inexpensive activities to point their patients to in the county, health care providers want prescription pads to “prescribe” whole health activities for their patients, the schools would love to provide education pieces and experiences to their students (yoga in the classroom!), and partners would like to incorporate links to resources on their own websites.
We’ve been working hard all spring to pull this together, both in finding funding sources and in developing the communication tools our partners can use to get this great information to their populations in a timely manner, especially as we gradually reopen. In the meantime, take a moment today to do something to benefit YOUR whole health; invite an isolated neighbor to coffee, spend two minutes listing what you’re grateful for or head outside for a quick ten minute walk around your block!
Dr. Monica Dixon, Co-Founder,
Olympic Peninsula Healthy Community Coalition