Functioning: The Key to Understanding Health

Abstract

Staying healthy is an important priority—but why is being healthy so important to you? It is because, when your body is healthy, you can do the things you want to do. We call this dimension of health functioning, and it results from complex interactions between biological health and a person’s external environment. If we want to include functioning in our definition of “health” so that it can be used in all fields of healthcare and research, we need a common set of terms and a shared set of methods for measuring human functioning. This article explains the concept of functioning and how this concept allows us to fully understand health—both the health of individuals and of the overall population. We will discuss how functioning can be measured by health professionals and describe an exciting new field, called human functioning sciences, that can open the door to a revolutionary approach to health and wellbeing. We will also provide an example of how functioning could be integrated into the healthcare system to improve patients’ experiences.