Susie Ellis, president & CEO of the Global Wellness Summit, has shared exclusively with Spa Opportunities her thoughts on how wellness industry leaders can “build a well world” and what that world might look like.

The theme of the 2015 Global Wellness Summit is “Building a Well World” and the event will take place in Mexico between 13-15 November.

How to build a well world by Susie Ellis

To put the theme of the 2015 Global Wellness Summit, “Building a Well World,” in context, we need to start with a grim reality: despite the fact that ‘the world’ is now more likely to agree that preventative health strategies (i.e., more exercise, healthier food, stress reduction, a cleaner environment, etc.) would result in happier, healthier, longer lives for people everywhere - and represent our best roadmap for curbing crippling health care costs – we live in a world that is just getting sicker, fatter, more sedentary and more depressed/anxious.

That disconnect between wellness ‘knowledge’ and action – whether at policy level; at corporate level; or a personal level, people struggling mightily with lifestyle change – just isn’t working well enough.

To understand a few reasons why it’s been so hard to move the needle on human health, means addressing some challenges unique to the whole concept of “building a well world”. For one, while the official US$3.4 trillion (€3trn, £2.2trn) wellness industry is growing so fast – spanning fitness, spa, nutrition/weight loss, complementary medicine, workplace wellness – there’s no ‘Big Wellness’, like a ‘Big Pharma’ or ‘Big Food’. It’s an extraordinarily fragmented industry, siloed even within its own sectors, which means it hasn’t been able to undertake unified, big-budget information and marketing campaigns of a pharma world. The wellness industries still need to get far more organised and speak more as one in communicating the evidence for their practices to every private and public sector possible.

Also, ‘true wellness’ is, of course, multi-dimensional. It means tackling so many pieces of a puzzle: from physical, to mental, to environmental health. There is no way to “build a well world” without reaching, and changing, minds across the public policy sector – whether in education, health, the environment or tourism – and the traditional medical, food, workplace wellness and media industries. These sectors traditionally only narrowly speak to themselves, but the key to change means creating honest knowledge-sharing across all these worlds.

This lack of knowledge-sharing has been a missing element in getting more doctors to ‘prescribe wellness’. We need to have policies in place that could support integrating more wellness into every aspect of life – from the food we eat, to the homes we live in. And that is why, in 2015, the Global Wellness Summit is taking steps to broaden its base to far more stakeholders across all wellness arenas and putting the ‘official’ wellness industry at the same problem-solving table with leaders from the medical, architecture/design, food/nutrition, technology, workplace wellness and policy worlds.

We believe in the power of new conversations and how people can infect each other with new ideas. And because we think that it’s crucial to any positive forward thrust on “building a well world” – it’s both our theme and our platform.

So many of the biggest health successes have come from public/private collaborations: from the anti-smoking campaigns of the mid-20th century, to new experiments quite literally aimed at “building well worlds”. Examples of these experiments include the appearance of ‘wellness cities’ that incorporate medical institutions, fitness and wellness, education for the young and old, amazing community-building programmes, on-site farming, sustainable and healthy building – in essence, any attempts to re-think every aspect of what a healthier life might look like.

We all have so many problems to solve – from trying to create and support lifestyle change and more self-responsibility for hundreds of millions more people, to how we can envision truly healthier workplaces that think far beyond employee wellness programs that cost millions, but engage few.

“Building a Well World” is a wilfully inclusive and ambitious conference theme, and it’s a goal that would take action on every front for decades, maybe even a century. This is the most important issue faced by our world, therefore we feel it’s a necessary step forward to making more inclusive, honest, high-level information- and problem-sharing happen between more stakeholders. No one is going to build a “well world” alone – not doctors, not governments and not the wellness industry. Everyone has to coordinate to find better solutions together.

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