House Calls

Join The Gesundheit! House Call Team

We are looking for people who want to offer one free house call per month. This house call would be a chance to do the generous, creative, fun and friendly health care of your dreams. And we are talking about health care in the broadest sense here. While the program was conceived for health care workers, it is open to anyone who wants to feel good having fun helping their neighbors. Caring for someone's health can mean shoveling their walk, getting them groceries, or listening to the stories that they need to share.

Just showing up is enough, but imagine the possibilities! You could dress up as your favorite character, bring your ukulele, or take along all the makings of a charming tea party for two. Give your imagination free reign. You can offer the form of health care you are most familiar with, or you can use this as an opportunity to venture into kinds of care you want to explore. The key element is that this be a gift from your heart that the two of you enjoy together.

Health care exchanged in this context of delight and sharing can revive those core reasons that inspired you to enter health care in the first place. In this setting, taking a blood pressure can help heal the soul.

For many of us in health care, the delight of creative, fun house calls is the sort of thing we wish we could be doing all the time. Committing to make one free house call per month is good for us, good for our patients.

Keep in touch with us, and you become a part of the Gesundheit! House Call network. You'll get a regular dose of this caring fun and know you're joining like-minded friends all over. By offering this service without money, you bring health care back home to a relationship between friends and make a powerful statement that reclaims it from the dragon of profit-motivated care.

How To Do It

Like many things, house calls can be even more fun when they're done with a friend. Grab someone you like to spend time with, and ask them to join you. You'll get double creativity, double satisfaction.

Here are the details: you choose the person that you want to visit and contact them. Picking a person you know helps you create a house call that really works, but it's also possible to act on a recommendation from a friend. Maybe you'll find inspiration in the housecall stories that follow this note. Keeping house calls local helps improve the health of the community you're living in.

Put some creative thought into how you could make this visit enjoyable for both of you. Patch's two books, Gesundheit! and House Calls, can be good sources of inspiration.

To be a part of our network, write a note after you have done your first house call and describe something about it: what you enjoyed, what worked well, what you learned, how it can support your other health care work. Send your note by mail to:

Gesundheit! Institute
ATTENTION: House Calls
P.O. Box 307
Urbana, IL 61803
USA

That's your ticket to join our team. Keep having fun making the world a better place.

Lots of love from the whole Gesundheit! gang!

On to House Calls Stories