September 12, 2013

Notes from the President - September 2013

Living and sharing good health

Prevention – Wellness – Lifestyle – Wholeness

Whatever you call it, it has been our “thing” for more than 100 years. From our very beginning to the latest research, improving one’s personal health behaviors has been at the heart of Loma Linda University Health in everything we do. We have taught good nutrition for a century, led the efforts against smoking, encouraged an active lifestyle, and in general pioneered the movement that is now sweeping across this country and around the world.

Occasionally alumni and others come up to me and say, “Dr. Hart, isn’t it terrible that others have stolen our thunder—they are telling and selling our message.” My response is always, “Praise the Lord—we have made a difference.” Let’s rejoice in this new awareness about the advantages of healthy living, and strive to do even more through research and education.

Let me share with you what our commitment is on this campus toward wellness. As part of Vision 2020, we want to make clear that the promotion of good health, in all its complexity and interrelatedness, is our primary objective. This includes the understanding that comes from a spiritual perspective and the motivation that comes from service to others. We will engage in high-tech medicine, pursue the latest research, and encourage training in the latest modalities. But at our core, we believe that the greatest benefit, the most bang for the buck, the happiest and most productive life, comes from following good health habits. So we intend to redouble our efforts to make sure that every student graduating from LLU, all 1,300 each year from our 100-plus programs, has personal knowledge on how to live healthfully as well as skills on how to share that knowledge with others.

We also intend to demonstrate good health practices across this entire campus—improving the menus in our cafeterias, encouraging daily exercise, strengthening personal support and relationships, and seeking wholeness in all our activities. Since we are self-insured for our employee and student health plans, we can monitor the effectiveness of what we do by how it impacts the incidence of various conditions and diseases, our use of medications, and the productivity of our employees. Mark Hubbard, our senior vice president for risk management, is chairing a working group to guide these initiatives on campus.

We will continue to expand our campus wellness program, called Living Whole, so ably led by Olivia Moses, with personalized programs designed for helping all who strive to achieve good health. As we refine this process, we plan to roll these programs out to our patients as well, through the utilization of LLEAP, our electronic medical record system. Patients will have access to our knowledge and programs in health promotion through community programs, web-based tools, active e-mail prompts, and other aids. In time, we expect to also push this information to the whole world through MOOCs—the acronym now given to Massive Open Online Courses delivered free over the Internet.

To bind together and feature this broad spectrum of programs, we feel a new name is appropriate. We have thought long and hard on how to capture our uniqueness among many competing programs on the market and have come up with WHOLE. HEALTH. We believe this captures our traditional emphasis on all aspects of life, including the physical, social, spiritual, behavioral, and environmental. It will also be used to feature our learning environment, called WHOLE. LEARNING.; our research activities—WHOLE. DISCOVERY.; and our behavioral objectives—WHOLE. RELATIONSHIPS.

To coordinate this major endeavor, we have asked Daniel Fontoura, currently one of our senior vice presidents in the Medical Center, to manage and facilitate this on a full-time basis. Daniel brings a personal passion for wholeness into his everyday living, along with considerable administrative skill and experience, and I am delighted he has agreed to lead out in our WHOLE. HEALTH. initiatives.

Our School of Public Health is also seeking to strengthen its programs and more effectively package them to match these changing national trends. Dean Tricia Penniecook has recently announced an organizational change to restructure their traditional six academic departments, currently aligned by discipline, into functional units organized by programmatic objectives. While still being refined, the academic center ideas gaining acceptance are: community resilience, healthy lifestyle and disease prevention, and health care leadership. Our traditional emphases on nutrition, global health, and other areas will be maintained and strengthened as we develop linkages across all the public health disciplines.

What does this all mean—for you, for Loma Linda, and for the many lives we impact? Do we still have something worth sharing? I am convinced that Loma Linda’s unique approach to health, with the understanding of ourselves as both children of God and stewards of this earth, connected and motivated by a commitment of service to others, will always be special. This brings a perspective to wellness that is unmatched by others. As this world struggles with many issues, including new avenues to improve both individual and corporate health, Loma Linda’s proven strategies for good health have never been more appropriate and important. Join me in sharing this good news with the world.

Office of the President, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350

Copyright © 2013 by Loma Linda University

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