Achieving health or achieving wellbeing?

Abstract

This article argues that achieving health and achieving wellbeing are different. The use of phenomenological and narrative approaches helped to elicit the meanings, nature and dimensions of wellbeing for ‘lay’ people, and also how wellbeing was maintained, lost and recovered. It indicates that the term ‘wellbeing’ has a much wider meaning than ‘health’. The two terms are interrelated, but the former has many more domains, health generally applying to the physical and sometimes to mental domains. The role of professionals in helping and hindering the attainment of wellbeing is examined. Prevention of ill‐health may well be the province of those who work in the health services, but promotion of health and wellbeing is much wider. Those in the health service and those in social services, education and other professions should be aware of what wellbeing is, and how they affect it, for both themselves and their clients.