Patients diagnosed with chronic diseases, for instance, cancer and cardiovascular disease can suffer extreme discomfort and large impacts to their everyday well-being. These can be temporary discomforts, and also long-term suffering. Many studies have shown that exercise and good nutrition do help improve a patients’ long-term health. Scientists and health insurance companies have been looking at ways as to how they can introduce long-term behavioral changes into a patients’ everyday life. These behavioural changes have become a common means in treating chronic diseases. The focus on an individual to change puts unnecessary pressure on their treatment and recovery journey. This is why insurance companies and scientists are encouraging “healthy settings” to make such changes easier. Improving a patients’ settings, e.g. supportive communities, centralized social health activities, social support, to name a few, is a new approach to community health. Within this approach, researchers are also looking to increasing prevention chains in communities too.
Professor Christine Holmberg from the Institute of Social Medicine and Epidemiology is working on developing a concept of social health for people suffering from chronic diseases in Brandenburg. She sees the lack of such discourse on community health and disease prevention. Krebsallianz has been supporting her research for the past few years. Her focus has been on how to develop a concept of centralized social health. The long-term goal of her project is to create structures and offer advice on how to create structures that enable "resonance spaces." These spaces aim to create a social framework for people with chronic diseases to help them adopt healthier practices in their everyday life.
In 2022, the project used two workshops at the Institute of Social Medicine and Epidemiology with institute staff from science and social work to brainstorm what a center for social health should look like and collect ideas for milestones, goals and tasks of such a center. Prof. Holmberg also conducted a number of talks throughout the year in politics and science in order to share her concepts and start a discussion.
Since then, the topic has gained national and international visibility, for example, Prof. Holmberg presented the concept at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, USA, where methods for treatment of cancer patients worldwide are shared and conceptualized. Prof Holmberg also held talks with various communities in the state of Brandenburg and they were approached as practice partners. Initial talks were also held with Gesundheit Berlin-Brandenburg e.V.