The Zebrin Foundation encourages holistic health practitioners to collect systematic data to document the effectiveness of their practices and to build partnerships with organizations.
Why collect data?
Collecting data on your practice is a powerful tool for building community partnerships that can help build your own practice and advance the stature of your healing profession. There are leaders and organizations in your community who serve clientele that can benefit from holistic healing modalities. These leaders include assessment specialists, school administrators and teachers, coaches, personal trainers, parents groups, elder services organizations, businesses with employee wellness programs, government agencies, healthcare providers, and others. They are in a position to recommend holistic modalities to their clients. But because they are organizations, they often need data to justify making those recommendations. This is why it is essential to collect data to build these partnerships.
The importance of partnerships
As holistic health practitioners, building these partnerships is one of the most powerful things we can do to build our practices and our professions. Partnerships open doors for yourself as a practitioner and for other practitioners working in your discipline. They increase the respect that our work deserves, and make holistic healing modalities more widely available within our society.
A little data can go a long way
Collecting data on your practice is more doable than you think. Even a little data can go a long way! For many organizational leaders, a small amount of informally collected data on your practice can be a sufficient basis for them to begin exploring a partnership with you. You don’t need to have a published, peer-reviewed research study in hand before you can start. You can gather meaningful, useful data without doing “research”.
Research Strengthens Partnerships
After you have begun a partnership with an organization, research is a powerful way to develop and strengthen that partnership. Gathering quality data on your work with the clients of your partner organization builds credibility and support for your work. It makes it easier to attract funding for research, and also makes it easier to recruit patients to participate in your study. For more about new directions in research, click here.
A community for practitioners
At Zebrin, part of our mission is to serve as an information hub for holistic health practitioners. We want to help you identify potential partnerships you might pursue, and about possible data that you could gather, to build your practice and your profession.