175,000 Patients a Year Will Benefit From Healthy Lifestyle Partnership

By: Adventist Record, and Adventist Review

Adventist HealthCare has welcomed healthy lifestyle advocate ELIA Wellness under its corporate umbrella.

Promoting a healthy lifestyle has been a priority of Adventist HealthCare’s Sydney Adventist Hospital in Australia since the hospital first opened in 1903 as a sanitarium, where people learned to stay well. It has also been a continuing aim of Adventist HealthCare’s other health-care service, San Day Surgery Hornsby, the first purpose-built day surgery in New South Wales when it opened in 1986.

ELIA Wellness was formed in 2016 to champion lifestyle medicine in research, policy, and practice. Its advocacy to help individuals achieve whole-person health includes the 7 Dimensions of Wellness Index, an analysis tool used in their wellness-enhancing programs.

ELIA Wellness will be financially independent from Sydney Adventist Hospital; however, it will benefit from the alliance and complement the hospital’s mission of helping promote health and healing of the body, mind, and spirit of patients, staff, and the wider community.

“This is an exciting advance for both Adventist HealthCare and ELIA Wellness,” said Adventist HealthCare chief executive officer Brett Goods.

“At Adventist HealthCare, we relish our role as a provider of acute, comprehensive, and expert care to meet our community’s needs when they are most vulnerable.

“Critically, however, the Adventist principles of a healthy and active lifestyle underpin the breadth of the wholistic care that we aim to offer our 175,000 patients a year.

“In providing that care, we are buoyed by the increasing recognition of the joys and the physical and mental rewards of actively seeking and following a healthy lifestyle.

“ELIA Wellness’s resounding success with its Live More Project, Wellness App, Lifestyle Medicine Summit, Partner training program, and proactive educational health and wellness resources provide an opportunity to respond to community interest.

“We are proud that the wider community will benefit from research and advice with the potential to help prevent and manage chronic disease as a result of collaboration with ELIA Wellness.

“This integration will help complement our care for our community. It is a forward-thinking step of which we are delighted to be part.”

ELIA Wellness executive director Geraldine Przybylko agrees. “We are thrilled that the extensive work of ELIA Wellness will be expanded by its association with Adventist HealthCare and Sydney Adventist Hospital and will further enable us to empower and transform the wider community to achieve whole-person health,” she said.

“The Adventist community has long understood the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. In fact, Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, United States, were identified by Dan Buettner in National Geographic as one of five regions in the world — or Blue Zones — where people live healthier for longer. Adventist health principles and lifestyle were key contributors to their longevity, with Adventists living up to 10 quality years longer than the rest of the nation.

“Adventists today welcome the growing body of scientific evidence confirming that lifestyle interventions can help prevent, manage, or arrest disease, with lifestyle medicine being one of the most exciting and fastest-growing healthcare disciplines today.

“This new alignment brings evidence-based acute clinical and lifestyle medicine together, building on both Adventist HealthCare’s rich heritage and ELIA Wellness’s innovation in the area of health and wellness to create a stronger platform to bring health, hope, and healing to the community.”

ELIA Wellness will be overseen by a management committee of expert, passionate, and committed individuals and will continue to provide services across Australia and New Zealand, including lifestyle medicine research to improve knowledge and practice, resource development for clinical, professional, and community engagement, and increasing access to lifestyle medicine through innovating digital services. It will also participate in training partners to provide location-based engagement for individuals, enhancing patient outcomes through collaboration with clinical partners, and nurturing a lifestyle medicine community through resources and industry news, leaders said.

The original version of this story was posted by Adventist Record.