Summary: The concept of coaching patients toward healthy behavior is deeply embedded in many integrative disciplines and practices. The healthcoach.com website, for instance, was claimed at the dawn of the worldwide web by a naturopathic doctor. The use of a health coach as a distinctive practice, however, evolved separately and more recently in the employee health and manage care industries. Now federal health reform legislation has highlighted the potential in health coaching. Nursing and integrative medicine leaders associated with Harvard University, University of Minnesota and the The Institute for Integrative Health have begun a defining process toward setting national standards and certification. The official kick-off is a Health and Wellness Coaching Invitational Summit this month. Representatives of the chiropractic and naturopathic disciplines have been invited. In reductive political terms, health coaching is broadly shared turf. All integrative practice fields that claim to be health creating have skin in this game of figuring out what is, certifiably, a health coach.

Extra! Extra! Invitational Health and Wellness Coaching Summit in September 2010 to propose plan of action for national certification.

Harvard's Institute of Coaching a key backer

This summit, sponsored by

is exceedingly timely. Integrative medicine leaders had a lead role in shaping this working meeting. Any self-respecting integrative practitioner worth their value set would be served to pay attention to its evolution. The organizers view the Summit as a kick-off of a months-long process toward setting the national standard.

The proximal instigator would appear to be that the role of health and wellness coaching was elevated as a health-promoting and cost-saving practice during the nation's 2009-2010 health reform discussions. Health coaching is specifically mentioned, for instance, in the language establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council. Coaching was positioned as part of the solution. Helping people get healthy. Ending our reactivity. Worker bees of health transformation. And likely reimbursed for it, these new professionals.

U Minnesota Center for Spirituality and Healing coach program

But what is a "health coach" exactly? And who can be one? And what do you have to do to become one? These are the kinds of questions with which the participants in the process that begins with this summit will be grappling.

Percival: ND was early developer of health coach concept

Nearly a decade later, in 1991,

Institute financially backs program

More recently, this internal concept for integrative practitioners has taken shape as a separate entity, externalized as a distinct type of professional. The website of a sponsor of the upcoming summit, The Institute for Integrative Health, led by University of Maryland integrative medicine director Brian Berman, MD, describes the history leading to the Summit this way:

"Over the last decade, professionals called 'health' or 'wellness coaches' have been providing a wide range of services, both independently and under the auspices of third-party payers and employee benefits companies. Among these professionals, there is great variability in the depth and content of training and skill, as well as in the services provided. Some have conventional health professional education, while others come from a general coaching background with minimal healthcare knowledge.

"In response to the need for and the variability of these services, leaders in integrative medicine began to collaborate with leaders in the field of health and wellness coaching, to define this new type of healthcare professional, focused on lifestyle change. The result is the Integrative Health and Wellness Coaching Invitational Summit ... "

The question for the various integrative practice fields is: Should we pay attention to the evolution of what we see as core value of our practices into a separate, certified, standardized field? 

At least two professional organizations have their own, related initiatives. The American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA) engaged an effort to create integrative coaching certification for nurses. The American Chiropractic Association has a new initiative to deliver wellness certification with a coaching component.

Lawson: Holistic/integrative medical leader a co-chair

Leaders of the AHNA initiative were part of the Summit's development. While planners did not originally include any practitioners from the distinctly licensed so-called "CAM" fields, they extended invites when such inclusion was suggested. A chiropractic leader with the ACA program will attend as will a naturopathic physician educator recommended by the chair of the Association of Accredited Naturopathic Medical Colleges.

Long-time integrative and holistic medicine leader