Now largely retired – and with five long term conditions to self-manage – Julian’s focus is on maintaining and improving his own wellbeing, whilst developing a robust method for doing this – and helping other patients and citizens do likewise. With a background in business coaching, and the design and maintenance of systems aiming at safety, free flow, quality and productivity, he hopes that the same principles can be practically applied to optimising the health & wellbeing of an individual – for surely each is also a unique whole system?
As a statistician and social scientist Julian seeks to locally research the extent to which individuals can legitimately and safely take charge of their personal health outcomes. He has found that becoming actively involved in his own community as a Patient Leader helps him enhance his own wellbeing as well as grow the community’s social capital. And now that GP practices are being contracted to install Social Prescribers, Julian hopes that some of his cohort will agree to becoming further tooled-up as volunteer “Community Connectors”.
With the help of the IVAR Building Health Partnership initiative in 2017-18, Julian co-created a 5 level model that integrates Self-Care with Social Prescribing and this is guiding our GP Network as we seek to establish the provision of both activities – copy available via julian@cohear.com.