News

June 1, 2015

Dr. David Kirschner gave an enthusiastically received presentation about the University of Evansville trial to the 2015 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in New Orleans. He was also invited to submit a chapter proposal for publication in the Handbook of Research on Serious Games for Educational Applications. The book’s editors accepted the chapter proposal, and the book is due out in 2016.

Dr. Ric Chambers sees HealthCARING as a way to capture an emerging cultural ethos driving attitudes, decisions, and behaviors toward improved health and wellbeing. He is training key individuals to become Health and Happiness Partners. The idea is to play off parallel paradigm shifts—in the health field toward prevention and wellness promotion and in the counseling field toward teaching positive or happiness psychology—by creating a new health professional: the Health and Happiness Partner. Essential to this new role will be learning, modeling, and teaching healthcaring as an ethos. The Health and Happiness Partners will become early adopters of the phrase, using it in contextually appropriate ways as they work with individuals all within a local community. As multiple people within a small area begin using this phrase in diverse ways, the hope is for others to not only adopt the phrase, but to use it to guide decisions and behavior that lead toward making healthcaring normative.

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May 1, 2015

38 students in the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at The University of Evansville, a Midwest liberal arts university, partnered with Open4Definition to design and test competitive and cooperative trials using HealthCARER PASS-IT-ON Credits.

Divided into ten teams and two broad experiential conditions, the enthusiastic DPT students in Dr. Karyn Staples's C ommunity Health class achieved 10 community health objectives related to HealthCARING during the Fall 2014 semester. Student teams identified creative methods of sharing HealthCARER Credits, tapped healthcaring individuals and organizations to uncover bright spots and best practices, and collected interview data, survey results and, above all, exemplary HealthCARER stories. More than 600 HealthCARERs have been recognized with PASS-IT-ON Credits, and HealthCARERs have shared almost 1,000 inspiring stories.

Using data collected from the University of Evansville trial, we are in the process of redesigning the website and the PASS-IT-ON system, including incorporating social media to grow healthcaring communities.

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September 25, 2014

Almost 40 students in the Physical Therapy DPT degree program at The University of Evansville, a Midwest liberal arts university, are partnering with Open4Definition to design and test competitive and cooperative trials using HealthCARER PASS-IT-ON Credits.

Divided into ten teams and two broad experiential conditions, the enthusiastic DPT students in Dr. Karyn Staples's Community Health class are working toward achieving ten community health objectives related to HealthCARING during the Fall 2014 semester. Student teams will identify creative methods of sharing HealthCARER Credits, tap HealthCARING individuals and organizations to uncover bright spots and best practices, and collect interview data, survey results and, above all, exemplary HealthCARER stories. More than 300 HealthCARERs were recognized with PASS-IT-ON Credits during the first week.

Over the next couple weeks, student teams will be forming alliance-like relationships with healthcaring individuals, groups and organizations to increase the spread and positive influence of HealthCARER PASS-IT-ON Credits.