The purpose of this paper is to determine the experience participating in a health promotion program for refugee and asylum seekers and torture survivors in a safety net clinical setting.
Refugee and asylum seeker torture survivors participated in a seven-week health promotion program at a safety-net clinic. Participants interviewed before, during and after the program was designed to improve and maintain health promotion program quality.
Six major themes emerged: social networks; tools/techniques/skills; wellness planning; spiritualism; health maintenance; and social/group interaction. Preliminary results suggest that this multi-pronged approach is feasible and acceptable to foreign-born torture survivors.
Torture impacts many facets of one’s life. A program which addresses health from a multidisciplinary perspective has promise to facilitate healing.
The impact of torture and human rights violations significantly affects many facets of peoples’ lives including emotional, social, physical and spiritual dimensions. Therefore a program which utilizes a multidisciplinary integrated bio-psychosocial and spiritual approach has the potential to simultaneously address many domains facilitating healing.
BeWell, a bio-psychosocio-spiritual health promotion strategy aimed at improving health service quality and increasing patient satisfaction to support positive health outcomes by implementing in-classroom/person modules for patients, to the authors’ knowledge is unique in its efforts to encompass multiple domains simultaneously and fully integrate an approach to wellbeing.
