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At this year’s Health and Well-Being Coaching Conference, Lecturer, Osher Affiliate, and Core Integrative Health Faculty Susan Whitman, PA-C, NBC-HWC, DipACLM, received the 2024 Raising the Bar Award—an honor that celebrates her excellence in healthcare education and her leadership’s meaningful impact in the field of integrative health. 

Whitman has been active in the healthcare field for over 30 years, starting as a ski patroller and EMT and becoming a primary care PA-C, first at the Community Health Center in Burlington then at Stowe Urgent Care. While doing this work, she wanted to help her patients engage more with their own health.

“I recognized that a lot of what I was doing,” Whitman says, “was spending 10 minutes with my patients, adjusting medications and then saying, ‘you know, if you ate better, exercised more, worked on your stress, and got better sleep, you wouldn’t have to be on all these medications…but I don’t have time or knowledge on how to help you with that, so good luck and I’ll see you in 6 months!’” Knowing she wanted to address the issue rather than persist in a state of burnout, she studied and received a certificate as an Integrative Health and Wellness Coach from Duke Integrative Medicine in 2012.

Whitman built her own coaching business, offering individual and group coaching and mindfulness practices with doctor’s offices, corporations, and universities, and was part of the first cohort to pass the . “Being able to assist folks to make behavioral changes that are meaningful to them and witnessing them understanding and seeing their own strengths has been incredibly rewarding,” she says.

A Growing Market for Change

Health coaching—different from psychotherapy, health education, disease management, personal training, or nutritional counseling—helps people build self-awareness, take action steps to strengthen and heal, and create a sustainable plan for thriving, taking into account their whole self. It is a fast-growing field that is well on its way to . Health and Wellness Coaching has been shown to be an effective intervention for health-related behavior change in both the prevention and treatment of obesity, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, and more.

Health coaches are becoming more common in primary care clinics, insurance-based programs, fitness facilities, disease management programs, wellness programs, and academic institutions. Two Integrative Health and Wellness Coaches joined �պ����� and �պ�����MC through Osher Center this past year: Melisa Oliva provides care to the community through �պ����� Employee Wellness and Jessica Coleman provides .

In 2014, Whitman began teaching and mentoring with the health coaching program at Duke Integrative Medicine and, in 2019, helped found the , a key part of the Osher Center’s Mission to advance whole-person integrative health through education, clinical care, research, and policy.

“Susan is not just a wonderful educator and health coach because of her ability to share knowledge and resources in an authentic and inspiring way,” says Osher Center Associate Director Cara Feldman-Hunt, MA, NBC-HWC, of Whitman’s work. “She is also a skilled researcher who can offer context for data and make it accessible. She’s really advancing the field.”

From 'Disease Management' to Healthcare

Some of Whitman’s , with Osher Affiliate Jeremy Sibold, Ed.D., ATC, NBC-HWC, and Osher Education Director Karen Westervelt, PhD, DPT, NBC-HWC, highlights how they created an to equip students starting out in health-related fields with knowledge and experience, especially if they are in majors such as Exercise Science that don't have a clinical licensure as a part of their degree.

But the program has potential to reduce strain on a beleaguered medical system by creating more support for preventative care and simultaneously addressing issues of provider burnout. “I'd love to see anyone going into any health-related field to get this education before they start further graduate training,” Whitman says. “Could you imagine how beneficial it would be if this was a part of pre-med curriculum?”

Whitman also co-founded and ran Richmond Community Kitchen (RCK) to support her local community and local producers. RCK offers locally sourced prepared meals, cooking classes, and event space to help make it easier for people to eat well and support local farmers. “I love to learn and connect and think about the big picture,” she says, “about how we can change the way healthcare is delivered, how to create environments and cultures where the healthy choice is the easy—and equitable—choice, how to change this giant system from a ‘disease management’ to a true ‘healthcare’ system.”

In 2023, Whitman started the Interprofessional Health Sciences PhD program here at �պ�����, focusing on Integrative Health. “Being able to be a part of the standardization and growth of the health and wellness coaching profession is exciting and humbling,” she says. “I’m excited to add to the growing body of evidence showing that there is another way to do things. I’m excited to work with people who say, ‘We should do it better, and we can do it better.’” As she skillfully and authentically guides the next cohort of Health & Wellness Coach trainees, Whitman is showing us all how.