Grow Your Wellness | Wellness Tree

A health and wellness resource centre for health professionals addressing non-communicable diseases and healthy ageing

GYW Spotlight Interviews

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This site provides a variety of educational, assessment, intervention and advocacy materials to support health professionals engaging in health and wellness activities. The focus is on the prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and the promotion of healthy ageing. NCDs represent the leading causes of mortality and disease burden globally and include diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, some cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and mental health conditions. Together they are responsible for 63% of deaths annually, 25% of these premature. Recent research also indicates that the majority of disease burden for older persons is non-communicable diseases.1

Addressing NCDs and ageing healthily rely on health promotion and disease prevention. This means tackling unhealthy lifestyles through effective interventions targeting tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and the harmful use of alcohol. As well, addressing NCD’s and promoting healthy ageing requires adherence to any necessary therapeutic interventions and other preventative activities such as routine adult immunizations that promote health through confering individual and community immunity.

Grow Your Wellness.com provides effective interventions to support people in making behavioral changes that address unhealthy practices and in taking actions that can lead to healthier lifestyles, enhanced quality of life and a longer ‘healthy-life’ expectancy.

Our Wellness Tree is a design concept illustrating some of the components that can influence health and well-being: the branches of our lifestyle choices … our environment…..our roots. The Tree also guides you through the various sections of the Grow Your Wellness resource centre.

1 United Nations Population Fund and Help Age International 2012, Aging in the Twenty-First Century: A Celebration and A Challenge ( New York and London, 2012).

For more information on the goals of this site and the Grow Your Wellness project, please consult the related press release.

Focus on NCD Prevention

Focus on NCD prevention - an NCD health risk assessment captured data from nurses participating in international nursing meetings leading up to the 64th World Health Assembly in Geneva. See the results here!