The BHMA believes that the following core values underpin holistic practice and that the above approaches require us to incorporate the following values in our daily lives whether as practitioners or patients:

Core Values

• compassion: being kind and caring towards others

• respect: taking into account people’s ideas, feelings and relationships

• open-mindedness: healthcare needs many good ways of being and doing

• competence: committed to ongoing professional and personal development

• self-care: looking after ourselves to become healthy citizens and effective practitioner

Action

• champion whole person approaches, especially within the NHS

• advocate ways to incorporate holism into healthcare organisations

• promote awareness of our self-healing capacity

• work with like-minded organisations to create healthy environments

• encourage research that seeks a holistic understanding of health and healing

• support healthcare workers to maintain their own health and well-being.

The BHMA was formed in 1983 by a group of medical doctors and students as an organisation for professional and members of the public who wanted to adopt a more holistic approach in their own life and work.  Twenty years on, the Association is just as determined to play a major role in ensuring that a whole person approach is central to the effective practice of healthcare.  To achieve our core purpose, the Association iwll reach out to decision makers and those working in healthcare to demonstrate the added value that holistic practic brings to patients and practitioners alike.  Through a significant nationwide membership of influential and like-minded individuals there is no doubt that the BHMA can help to shape the future of healthcare in the UK.  We have, therefore, developed a programme of activity that is designed to enable the dissemination of informatin, and to create opportunities with an interest in whole person care to share their experiences and ideas.

Why is the BHMA relevant?

It is a time of great opportunity for holistic thinking and practice.   Despite the huge increase in the NHS budget and advances in the medical management of disesases such as cancer and heart failure, patients and health workers alike are dissastisfied with the quality of healthcare.  There is a widespread search for better integration of healthcare effort, and holistic understandings of health and dignity.  At the same time, advances in science receal that ht body-mind behaves more like a self-healing hologram than a stack of diagnostic catergories.  Increasingly researchers challenge the relevance of test tube science when considering the dynamic interplay of factors required for good health: an aliveness of spirt and quality therapeutic relationships.

The above information has been supplied from the Main BHMA website http://www.bhma.org/

A Welsh Chapter of the BHMA is being formed

I will be doing a newsletter for members

Any events you have planned or any information you'd like to include in the newsletter or for more information.

Contact me on:

cara.moore@caraemoore.co.uk

I'd like to feature a member monthly, so if you'd like to be profiled, send your information and any photos or materials to me and I'll include it.

Become a member now!

Upcoming Events

First Meeting of Welsh Chapter of BHMA

Date to be set shortly.