I often wish I had more time in my practice to utilize more holistic assessments. Do you use any assessment tools like these?
How does wellness and emotional well-being impact the body, mind, and spirit of an individual?
How is information from these assessments used to inform the treatment process?
Inventories and Assessment Tools
The assessments I reviewed were the TestWell and the BSM-WBCI. One assessment was more readily used in the 1990’s, while the other is more commonly used now days. Both were used with college age individuals and use multiple measurements. These tools are used to help professionals assess wellness in relationship to body, mind and spirit.
Basic Features
The basic features of the questionnaire TestWell Inventory has 100 questions. It has 10 areas of assessment including the following: physical fitness, nutrition, self-care and safety, emotional wellness, social awareness, emotional awareness and sexuality, emotional management, intellectual wellness, occupational wellness, and spirituality and values. The scoring is used in a 5 point Likert scale, scores from 100-500. The BSM-WBCI measures 6 areas including physical, emotional, intellectual, occupational, social, and spiritual wellness.
Similarities and Differences
The TestWell Inventory can take over an hour and generally has a cost associated. The BMS-WBCI is straight-forward 44 questions, and it emphases the assessment of frequency of positive health behaviors, making it a useful assessment tool to identify health-risk behaviors and create improvement goals. The BMS-WBCI body dimension correlates with TestWell’s Physical Fitness, Nutrition, and Self-Care and Safety subscales (Hey, Calderon, & Carroll, 2006). The mind dimension was highly correlated with TestWell’s Social Awareness, Emotional Awareness, and Intellectual Wellness subscales. The spirit dimension was highly correlated with the TestWell Spirit and Wellness dimension (Hey, Calderon, & Carroll, 2006).
Informing the Treatment.
BMS-WBCI has 44 items, with scores ranging from 44 to 132. Scores below 74 indicate the need for immediate change in behavior, scores above 103 indicate that a wellness lifestyle exists, and scores from 74 to 103 indicate that behavior change is needed in certain areas.
Would you find benefit in utilizing assessments like these?
References
Bart, R., Ishak, W. W., Ganjian, S., Jaffer, K. Y., Abdelmesseh, M., Hanna, S., … Danovitch, I. (2018). The Assessment and Measurement of Wellness in the Clinical Medical Setting: A Systematic Review. Innovations in clinical neuroscience, 15(9-10), 14–23
Hey, W. T., Calderon, K. S., & Carroll, H. (2006). Use of body-mind-spirit dimensions for the development of a wellness behavior and characteristic inventory for college students. Health Promotion Practice, 7(1), 125-133. doi:10.1177/1524839904268525