HEALWELL
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Mission Statement
Touch. Teach. Advocate. We touch people affected by illness. We teach massage therapists how to provide care safely and effectively. We advocate for access to that care and for a broader role for massage therapists in healthcare.
About This Cause
The experience of illness is stressful, expensive and lacking in authentic human contact. Healwell envisions a world where the experience of illness includes meaningfully integrated massage therapy provided by uncommonly skilled and compassionate massage therapists working alongside established mainstream providers. Our education programs build and strengthen the healthcare workforce by elevating the level of training for massage therapists and providing self-awareness, mindfulness, compassion and resiliency training for physicians, nurses, social workers and others. Our research partnerships add valuable data to the evidence base supporting the value of integration of massage therapy in oncology, palliative care, sickle cell disease, rehabilitative medicine and a variety of other populations. Healwell's highly-skilled therapists provide direct, hands-on care to the DC area's sickest patients in their homes, in hospitals and everywhere care is provided in direct partnership and collaboration with hospital systems, clinics and care teams in addition to serving other members of the community living with acute, chronic and serious illness who pay out of pocket for our services while hospitalized or in their homes or other care facilities. Healwell's founder was providing massage to their grandfather at what turned out to be the very moment of his death. This changed everything. The ability to be present and to provide comfort at such an important time catapulted Cal into a deep desire to bring that experience to others. When Cal graduated from massage school in 2005, they were hired to provide massage at a hospital in Arlington. As they made their way in the hospital, Cal began to create what was needed, establishing a standard of training for the therapists to be hired and building relationships with administrators and practitioners. There were, and still are, some big barriers. Massage therapists are not trained to be healthcare professionals. Well-conducted research about massage therapy’s effects on the lives and bodies of very sick people is lacking and the massage profession has set itself up, through years of well-meaning volunteerism, to be undervalued. Creating real change meant cultivating highly skilled, but humble and curious massage therapists who could build trust and add value. Healwell provides care that matters in the lives of real people living with illness by bringing a level of skill and compassion to the table that makes the value of massage therapists clear. Love, curiosity and humor come together at Healwell to make way for clinical excellence and unparalleled compassionate care. We are well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the desire to decrease opioid use in chronic pain and illness treatment. Our target population is people who have been made vulnerable by acute, chronic or terminal illness. We partner with programs, facilities and hospitals to establish funding to make our care available to all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. Our goal is to incorporate highly skilled massage therapists wherever people living with illness are receiving care. We serve our target population directly through massage therapy, but our target population is also meaningfully affected when we provide resiliency, self-awareness and communication training for nurses, physicians, social workers and other members of the standard care team. Healwell partners with healthcare providers to bring humanity and compassion back to the bedside of real people living with illness. We use mindfulness, meditation and other tools to cultivate kind, skillful practitioners and teams working not only with massage therapists, but also frontline providers. We conduct research to demonstrate the value and feasibility of incorporating massage therapy in the care of patients who would not typically have access to it. Laying the groundwork for a kind, sustainable healthcare workforce is social justice work. We are improving access to human-centered care, breaking down prejudices in all directions about who "deserves" to be seen and cared for with compassion and creating meaningful career opportunities for massage therapists who want to change the experience of illness for the people they touch. Our healthcare system's over-reliance on pharmacology for pain and symptom management is a serious issue with often-tragic personal and financial impacts. The Joint Commission, the CDC and other policy leaders are calling on providers of healthcare to seek out "non-pharmacologic" pain and symptom management interventions and to make them available to patients. Although the Affordable Care Act has been largely dismantled, "massage therapy" was written into that law over 3,000 times and massage therapists specifically included as members of the "healthcare workforce." Massage therapy and massage therapists will be in increasing demand as our nation moves back toward human-centered care that focuses on less-invasive ways of caring for people affected by illness. The shift toward quality of life and overall sense of well-being as real priorities in medicine has opened an important door through which most massage therapists are not prepared to walk in a way that will add value to patient experience or meaningfully address the issues of over-medication and overly invasive care. Healwell differentiates itself by understanding the value of pharmacology and of more invasive interventions while seeking opportunities for collaboration as a powerful, evidence-based, human-centered partner in care and viable alternative when appropriate. “Ideally, most patients with severe persistent pain would obtain pain care from an interdisciplinary team.” -Institute of Medicine, National Academies report, Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research (2011). Truly interdisciplinary care is hard to execute, but it is essential to the future of health in our culture. Our three program arms are designed to support each other in bringing massage therapy and massage therapists from their historical position of "nice to have" to a position of "essential to quality care." 1. Direct Service: Our massage therapists work with a wide variety of adult and pediatric patients at facilities and in-patient homes throughout the DC metro area. Hospitals put our massage services in the budgets of the departments we serve and/or conduct their own philanthropic efforts to fund our services. When we conduct courses for massage therapists and other clinicians, the attendees pay tuition directly to Healwell. Healwell therapists are all employees and work on a regular schedule staffing our service programs. Employees who work 18 hours or more are eligible for a 50% health insurance contribution and all are entitled to a 50% discount on Healwell courses. When services are provided, Healwell invoices the related facilities and clients. We require that partner organizations grant our therapists clinician-level access to the electronic medical record and, when possible, to attend interdisciplinary team meetings and other clinical care gatherings. We are credentialed as medical staff or contractors within the systems where we work. 2. Education: Healwell creates and provide hands-on, knowledge-transfer and competency-based courses that address clinical skill gaps as well as foundations of effective care like ethics, active/generous listening, open communication and the translation of these skills into excellent patient care. All of our courses offer CE credit to a wide array of clinicians including nurses, social workers and health care administrators. We teach skills of resiliency and compassion for themselves and others. When other providers train with massage therapists, an increased openness and creativity about meaningful integration of massage therapy results. This spring, we will partner with a well-known chef and registered dietician to conduct a residential retreat for registered dietitians who practice in clinical settings to support cultivation of the skills mentioned above. We are also working with VHC and MWHC to directly support physicians and surgical residents by providing mindfulness training and massage therapy. Healwell's only program provided on a volunteer basis is with OAR. Our organizations are committed to a growing partnership that will incorporate positive touch and mindfulness into the lives of incarcerated and recently released individuals, whose lives and incarceration history have resulted in chronic health challenges. We also contracted with OAR leadership to run a half-day staff retreat to support intra-agency collaboration, compassion and positive touch. 3. Research: We have published research with CNMC about massage therapy for pediatric oncology patients. We have presented our research with MWHC palliative care patients about feasibility and opioid use. We are currently conducting a study to measure massage's effect on "self-efficacy" in patients who have undergone left ventricular assistive device surgery. In late 2019 we concluded a 400-patient palliative care massage therapy dosing study at MWHC, the largest study of its kind. We have submitted two research grant proposals for 2020. The first is a multi-site study (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and CNMC); the second is an NIH Small Business Innovation grant in partnership with Inova.