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Distance Learning

Fees

Full course: $600

This includes:

  • All of the course materials
  • Internet interaction by email with the facilitators over a two month period
  • A certificate of participation from King University

Course without participation in email interaction with facilitators, no certificate: $300

Additional set of 1 “God, Medicine, and Miracle” book and work book: $50.00

Contact

  • Ivy Ritchie
    Peeke School of Christian Mission
    Center for Global Health
    King University
    1350 King University Rd.
    Bristol, TN 37620 USA
  • Phone: 423-652-4157
  • Fax: 423-652-4788
  • Email: [email protected]

Background

Many chronic illnesses from which people suffer today all over the world are related to issues of life-style, behavior, broken relationships, or inner problems of anxiety, guilt, fear, painful feelings, or poorly handled stress. The modern bio-medical approach to illness focuses primarily on the physical dimension of illness and seeks to cure or control the physical disease. Biomedicine largely ignores the psycho-social and spiritual dimensions of the sick person and the illness, yet these dimensions play important roles in health, in the disease, and in the therapeutic process.

Course Description

This course presents a scientifically based and biblically holistic approach to caring for sick persons as whole persons. This approach combines the best of medical care, psycho-social care or ‘cure of the soul’, and spiritual care. It stresses the importance of developing a team approach to this comprehensive care so that it can occur in one clinical setting. It also describes how to train spiritual caregivers to function as members of the clinical team.

For health professionals, the course teaches the principles and practice of whole person care and provides the materials needed for training spiritual caregivers.

The course is likewise practical for non-medical people and especially church leaders who want to come alongside people who are carrying heavy inner burdens and need the help of those trained in caring for people with broken hearts and wounded spirits.

Although direct interaction between facilitators and students is not possible in a distance course, electronic interaction through e-mail with the two co-facilitators is built into this course. This interaction will be possible during selected months of each year. This interaction is required for receiving a certificate, Continuing Medical Education credit, or Continuing Education Units for nurses.

Course Objectives

  1. Describe the inadequacy of the bio-medical model that focuses primarily on physical aspects of disease and not on the whole person
  2. Contrast this with examples of healing the whole person and how we can do the same
  3. Explain the biblical basis for wholeness of the person
  4. Describe the scientific understanding of the body/mind relationship and the complete integration of body, mind, soul, and spirit
  5. Outline the basic components of the mind and personality
  6. List common affective personal and emotional problems and explain their negative influence on health and healing
  7. Describe resources available through faith for emotional, spiritual, and physical
    healing and for health maintenance
  8. Outline an approach to personal and spiritual assessment
  9. Describe the caring relationship with a sick person
  10. Outline approaches to caring for persons who have painful feelings, much stress, cancer, are aging, face an imminent death, or have a chronic physical or emotional illness
  11. Describe how to train lay counselors as members of the caregiving team

The Principles and Practice of Community Health

This is a DVD-based distance learning course consisting of:

  • 30 forty-minute video presentations in a DVD format
  • A workbook, 125 pages: Principles and Practice of Community Health
  • A book: Let’s Build Our Lives
  • A book: Let’s Restore Our Land
  • A booklet: Teaching Our Children God’s Ways
  • E-mail interaction with the Dr. Fountain, the facilitator

Facilitator

Dan Fountain, M.D. MPH, Director, Global Health Training Program, King University

Certificate

  • Those who complete the course will receive a certificate of participation from King
    University
  • Nurses wanting CEU credit can submit the certificate to their state accrediting board
  • Estimated time to complete course is three months

Original release: November 1, 2010

THERE IS NO COMMERCIAL SUPPORT FOR THIS ACTIVITY

Fees

Full course: $600

This includes:

  • All of the course materials
  • Internet interaction by e-mail with the facilitator
  • A certificate of participation from King University

Additional set of the workbook and books: $50.00
Registration Form
Brochure

Contact

  • Ivy Ritchie
    Peeke School of Christian Mission
    Center for Global Health
    King University
    1350 King University Rd.
    Bristol, TN 37620 USA
  • Phone: 423-652-4157
  • Fax: 423-652-4788
  • Email: [email protected]

Background

  • How can we help people improve their sanitation and water supply when they believe sickness comes from the curse of an enemy of from the spirit of a disgruntled ancestor?
  • How can we help a mother feed her malnourished child a healthy diet when she believes malnutrition is the will of God?
  • How can we help communities improve their living conditions if everything, good and evil, comes from God?
  • Why does so much of our health education produce so little behavior change?

Course Description

Many common health problems around the world come from unhealthy behavior.  Motivating people to make behavioral changes is difficult because the roots of behavior are in culturally determined beliefs and values.  The arena for promoting behavioral changes is in dialogue about the cultural values, beliefs and world view assumptions that underlie behavior. An understanding of  the dynamics of culture and the practice of cross-cultural communication is essential for successful motivation of changes in community development, and behavior related to health, nutrition, and agriculture. The biblical world view provides the basic principles of health and healthy behavior and gives core cultural values important for community development.

This workshop will bring together scientific and biblical principles of health and agriculture, cross-cultural methods of communication, and skills in establishing relationships that facilitate behavioral changes for the improvement of health, nutrition, and care for the environment. It is excellent preparation for an inter-cultural ministry of transformational development.

Course Objectives

  • Discuss basic principles of community health.
  • Identify obstacles to changing health-related behavior.
  • Describe the dynamics of culture and how cultures function.
  • List cultural values that favor progress and health and others that impede them.
  • List and describe biblical and cultural foundations for community health.
  • Describe principles and practical applications of cross-cultural communication.
  • Outline worldview assumptions and values of traditional, Islamic and Western cultures.
  • Describe principles and methods of participatory non-formal adult education.
  • List principles of planning, organizing, and financing health programs.
  • Describe principles of motivating and empowering community and church leaders in health and development activities.
  • Describe the process of decentralizing primary health care to make it accessible to everyone.
  • Describe the organization of pre-school , antenatal, and family health consultations, the enlarged program of vaccinations, and nutrition services
  • Describe effective no-cost methods of restoring soil fertility and restoration of forests

Dan Fountain, M.D., MPH

Dr. Dan Fountain spent 35 years as a medical missionary in the Vanga Hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). In partnership with the Congolese healthcare staff, he helped develop a comprehensive health service consisting of a 400 bed multi-specialty training hospital, training programs for diploma and auxiliary paramedical personnel, a rural health zone with a decentralized network of 50 rural health centers bringing primary health care to 250,000 people in 300 communities, community health initiatives throughout the health zone, a family medicine residency training program, and a holistic approach to caring for the whole person with special adaptations for caring for persons
with HIV/AIDS.

Since 1996, Dr. Fountain has taught whole person care and community health in various countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He is now the director of the Global Health Training Program at King University in Bristol, TN, facilitating workshops to train health professionals serving the poor domestically and internationally. He is on the overseas faculty of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, and on the board of Project MedSend. He has written several books in French and English for primary health care personnel, and books on the biblical basis for health and healing.

Dr. Fountain discloses that he(she) has no proprietary, financial, or personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service, and/or company that will be discussed or considered during the proposed program.

Sherry O’Donnell, D.O.

Dr. Sherry O’Donnell received her medical degree at Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1995 and she completed her residency in internal medicine in Tulsa, OK. She practiced for three years in southwestern Michigan in the Southwestern Medical Clinic P.C. and then in a hospital emergency room. She opened her own practice of internal medicine, the Rappha Medical Center in St. Joseph MI, in July 2003.

Dr. O’Donnell has a vision to merge medicine and ministry in treating the whole person. She has traveled to more than 20 countries in teaching and practicing whole person care. She is board certified in internal medicine, and is affiliated with the Christian Medical Association, the American Osteopathic Association, the American Medical Association, the Michigan Osteopathic Association and the Michigan State Medical Society. She has staff privileges at the Lakeland Hospital in St. Joseph, Michigan where she was named Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine for 2007.

Dr. O’Donnell discloses that he(she) has no proprietary, financial, or personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service, and/or company that will be discussed or considered during the proposed program.

The planning committee members, Dr. Errol Rohr, Dr. Gene Rudd, and Dr. David Stevens, do not have any proprietary, financial or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product service and/or company that will be discussed or considered during this activity.