Too often, calls to improve global health and wellbeing fail to lead to concrete actions. GWI seeks to improve global wellness by both inspiring and facilitating meaningful change. The Wellness Policy Series aims to spark conversations about promoting wellness, and to provide specific guidelines for achieving this goal. The Policy Toolkits are roadmaps with detailed directions for bringing wellness to all communities. They present the case for why wellness policies are needed and provide a set of strategies for government organizations, industry, and the community to collaborate in enhancing our wellbeing. GWI designed these toolkits to aid anyone interested in promoting wellness.
How can these toolkits help stakeholders turn ideas into action?
Successful wellness policies encourage healthy behaviors and lifestyles, and create wellness-supporting environments to improve our wellbeing. In Defining Wellness Policy, GWI identified key wellness areas or domains that affect both individual behaviors and our surrounding environments. Each toolkit focuses on one of seven interrelated domains: physical activity, healthy eating, mental wellness, traditional and complementary medicine, wellness in the built environment, wellness at work, and wellness in tourism (see table below). These domains cut across many different government agencies and they depend upon many different businesses and sectors within the wellness economy. Policy actions within one domain can impact other areas. For example, policies that encourage physical activity can have a big impact on mental wellness.
Every toolkit explains the need for wellness policy action in that domain and how stakeholders (governments, businesses, communities and nonprofits) can address important issues and gaps. They provide examples and wellness policy initiatives designed to foster wellness-promoting behaviors and environments. While identifying specific issues and barriers to wellness promotion in each domain, the toolkits also address the wellness needs of specific populations and lifespan groups, including underserved and vulnerable groups such as children and seniors. For those who wish to take action and need inspiration and guidance, they offer relevant data, evidence, examples and resource lists.
Since 2022, GWI has released three Policy Toolkits addressing wellness challenges in physical activity, wellness in tourism, and mental wellness. Each toolkit takes a holistic approach to promoting wellness in these domains:
- The Physical Activity Toolkit discusses the many challenges that contribute to high and rising levels of physical inactivity and examines specific ways in which new policies, government resources, and cross-sector partnerships can address those gaps and constraints.
- The Wellness in Tourism Toolkit identifies barriers preventing wellness tourism from delivering broad-based health and wellbeing, and presents policy ideas that enhance the quality of place not just for tourists, but also for local residents and destinations.
- The Mental Wellness Toolkit explains how mental wellness promotes mental health and offers community-focused solutions to address our critical need to support it.
GWI’s research team will discuss wellness policy and the toolkits in a webinar on April 2. Register HERE.
To learn more about the Wellness Policy Toolkits, see the first report in GWI’s series: Defining Wellness Policy.
