FLOURISH – A Scoping Study

Research Framework

Creating an enabling society

Overview

We are wondering what works (and doesn’t work) to optimise health for people with long term health conditions to flourish throughout their life span.

Service provision aimed at optimising people’s health tends to be focused nearer to the point when a person is first diagnosed or first acquire their health condition. However, since health is an emergent set of capacities that develops over a lifetime enabling people to interact successfully with their physical, psychological and social environments, resources may be required at different times in a person’s life – as their environmental context changes, or within the trajectory of their health condition.

Despite constraints associated with underfunding and under servicing, people experiencing disability develop and utilise a wide range of strategies that support themselves to live well. Currently, there is little information exploring what internally-derived or externally-provided resources work (or don’t work) to support health optimisation across the lifespan. Such an understanding would contribute to the design of mana-enhancing health service delivery, promoting strengths-based approaches, empowering people who experience disability to live well across their lifespan.

Method

Update: due to the Covid-19 pandemic this research has been adapted. We are now conducting interviews to collect the data. We are also adding additional questions about the impact of NZ’s pandemic response on participant’s ability to maintain their health and wellbeing. 

In this study, we are going to run workshops within the Canterbury region with a range of long-term health conditions – both neurological and musculoskeletal. We want to hear their thoughts about how a range of resources work to support them maintain their health. For example, we will talk about:

• Internal resources that participants feel help them to live well
• Supportive attributes of services and/or other groups that they access (or would like to access)
• How well (or not) they feel their needs are being met.

Status of Research

• Analysis underway

Outputs

Research Feedback report March2021