The application of salutogenesis in the training of health professionals

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe an empirically developed educational strategy that health profession training programmes could use to infuse students in the health professions with salutogenesis thinking and capability in their approach to patient care and health promotion activities. This strategy is based on years of research and teaching mental health, health promotion, and salutogenesis to students on bachelor, postgraduate, masters, and continuing education levels. Any educational strategy aiming to teach salutogenic practice should be grounded in the ontological stance that salutogenesis represents, and it should comprise salutogenesis as a body of knowledge, as a continuous learning process, as a way of working, and as a way of being. The overall objective is not the healing of diseases, but the facilitating and supporting of health-promoting processes leading to a person’s or group’s adaptive coping and enhanced ease and well-being. A key outcome of such training is that the student develops the capacity to manage herself in the salutogenic way. This means developing the capability called “self-tuning,” which is habitual self-sensitivity, reflection, and mobilizing of resources to maintain and improve one’s own health (“ease,” in Antonovsky’s terms). This is a form of self-care, the principles of which can be used by health professionals to assist patients and others to experience good health and well-being. A health professional’s “salutogenic capacity” is her degree of skill to help a person or group examine, mobilize, and deploy sufficient resources to achieve a shift towards the experience of good health and well-being. Salutogenic capacity can be expanded as part of the professional training, as described in this chapter. The methods learned can be applied after training, such that salutogenic capacity is strengthened and reinforced during the course of one’s career.