Wellness Coaching Initiative Awareness Action Kits
One aspect of diversity that often gets overlooked is age, yet age is the one element of diversity every human will eventually share. Demographic aging and increasing age diversity have hastened the need for societies and employers to support individuals across their lifespans.
Coaching, as a profession, can play an important role in promoting gender equality among employees in the healthcare system by helping to identify and remove gender-based barriers that hold people from advancing, including bias, stereotypes, and lack of access to leadership roles (Boldly, 2023).
Health and Wellness Coaches can effectively support individuals of diverse sexual orientations by cultivating an inclusive and welcoming space. This involves incorporating inclusive language and explicitly communicating a commitment to diversity.
Although hospitals and healthcare settings often have a religious or spiritually designated room, there is still a level of discomfort between patients and healthcare providers when discussing spirituality and religion in traditional healthcare settings, health coaches are trained to explore with curiosity and compassion the deep beliefs of individuals focusing on the bio-individual nature of people (Spirituality and Aging, 2011). Health Coaches take a person-centered approach to health beyond the physical body to encompass all aspects of health, including physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being (Sager, 2020).
Health and Wellness Coaches are equipped to work with the person, not their health condition, and to recognize ‘intersectionality’ — that people may fall into two or more categories of disability. From the perspective of ‘goal setting’, Health and Wellness Coaches can support clients in expressing a wider sense of agency and making an impact on their own environment, for example, to find or develop appropriate ‘adjustments’ to their work and/or personal life (Parsons, 2023).
SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS AND SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH
Health behaviors shape health and well-being in individuals and populations. A social determinants approach recognizes the interplay between the incorporation of biological and psychological processes in complex, dynamic systems, embracing a population approach that situates individuals in context (Short & Mollborn, 2015).
