Article by Jason Patten
Virtually every culture throughout history has used some combination of manual therapies, herbal products, water, heat and physical surroundings to create rituals and therapies aimed at achieving health, beauty and rejuvenation. It seems that these practices have now found a melting pot with the emergence of the spa industry (now considered by many to be the ‘spa and wellness’ industry). This industry, which has massage as its core offering, has adopted ‘wellness’ as a new mantra and has become a global phenomenon that is part of a trillion dollar wellness revolution.
It seems that 2008 has seen the wellenss industry come of age with many landmark developments (see table). A report released in May at the Global Spa Summit in New York on the Global Spa Economy(1) suggests that global revenue from spas in 2007 was worth more than US$255 billion globally. Of this massage and other direct spa services accounted for US$48 billion. The report further estimates that in 2007 the wider wellness industry which was worth an additional US$1.1 trillion.
Understanding the Global Spa Industry
While the spa and wellness industry has been growing steadily over the past 2 decades, it has been constrained by a lack of comprehensive information about the industry and the associated business models. The lack of quality information about the wellness industry has been partly addressed by the
release this month of the first comprehensive text on the global spa industry titled “Understanding the Global Spa Industry”(2). This text written by a team of 30 internationally renowned business leaders, practitioners and academics from 10 countries and edited by Prof Marc Cohen from RMIT university and Prof Gerry Bodeker from Oxford University covers everything from the beginnings of the industry through to the size of the market, typologies, marketing, branding and business models to contemporary management practices and social and ethical issues.
This text arose out of a conversation at the first Spa Asia Wellness Summit between the editors where they noted that the spa and wellness industry did not appear on the academic ‘radar’ despite it being a sizable public health phenomenon. It certainly does seem surprising that there could be a $255 billion/year industry that does not have any dedicated texts devoted to it. This is partly due to the fact that spa and wellness is a convergence of many existing industries such as hospitality and tourism, hotel management, natural and complementary medicine, massage, fitness, nutrition, beauty, design, media, and property development, all of which have their own cultures, business models and educational programs. As these existing industries converge they have created the spa and wellness industry which can now be seen to be a unique industry in its own right.
While the lack of quality information about the spa and wellness industry has constrained its growth by making it invisible to investors, policy makers and other potential stakeholders, the industry has also been constrained by a global labour shortage. There simply aren’t enough trained therapists and managers around to cope with the demand and there is a shortage of highly trained people to act as industry leaders. As a consequence there has been a lack of managers who understand the intimate, high-touch nature of the industry and a steady lowering of the educational standards for therapists to enter the industry,. There ahs also been a global competition for therapists and a corresponding movement of workers from developing countries in Asia to the Middle East and other regions that can offer more attractive remuneration packages.
Masters of Wellness
To support the need for high level leaders RMIT University has just launched a new Master of Wellness program (see www.rmit.edu/health-sciences/wellness). This program has been designed to provide graduate students for diverse backgrounds with a holistic overview of wellness and produce highly skilled practitioners and managers who will lead the wellness revolution and contribute to solutions to living ‘well’ on the planet. The Program also aims to positively impacting on students’ personal health and wellbeing and uses cutting edge educational technology and the latest understanding about adult teaching and learning to deliver a fully online program with a global reach.
As the wellness industry is extremely diverse RMIT’s Master of Wellness program is designed to cater for students from a wide variety of educational backgrounds. Thus, rather than restricting entry into the program to students with a health sciences background, the program is open to anyone with an undergraduate bachelor degree or an Advanced Diploma and 3 years industry experience. The program caters for the needs of different students by offering a wide range of electives that include business courses (eligible students can use these to gain credit towards an RMIT Master of Business Administration) as well as courses on ‘Food as Medicine’, “Herbs and Supplements’, ‘Sustainability’, and ‘Integrated Eastern Anatomy’. There are plans to extend the range of electives each year to include other areas such as design, yoga and fitness instruction.
What is Wellness?
The development of a postgraduate Wellness program suggests that wellness is emerging as a new academic discipline. Yet ‘wellness’ is a vague concept that is still evolving. Wellness is a holistic, multidisciplinary concept that includes personal wellbeing, health and happiness, along with sustainability, corporate social responsibility, policy, social justice, environmental responsibility, human security, ethical and spiritual dimensions. As yet, wellness has no rigorously developed definition, theory or philosophy of wellness although a suggested definition is: “Wellness is the multidimensional state of being “well”, where inner and outer worlds are in harmony: a heightened state of consciousness enabling you to be fully present in the moment and respond authentically to any situation from the “ deep inner well of your being ”. Wellness is dynamic and results in a continuous awakening and evolution of consciousness and is the state where you look, feel, perform, and stay “well” and, therefore, experience the greatest fulfilment and enjoyment from life and achieve the greatest longevity.” (3)
Wellness on the World Stage
In addition to the emergence of the global spa industry, wellness appears to be gaining prominence on the world stage. At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, in Davos, in January 2008, workplace wellness programs were discussed and the results of a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation were released which suggested that workplace wellness programmes are a real yet under-exploited opportunity to tackle the growing world-wide epidemic of chronic disease and presented a call for action to raise employee health on the corporate agenda(4). This coincides with a report from PriceWaterHouseCoopers titled “Working Towards Wellness”(5) that suggests that large multinational corporation are now looking for wellness strategies to implement in their workplaces and the communities in which they operate.
While there are moves towards bringing wellness into the corporate sector, there are also suggestions that a wellness agenda needs to infiltrate the health system. In another report by PriceWaterHouseCoopers titled “Healthcast
2020”(6) it is suggested that current healthcare systems will become inherently unsustainable over the next 15 years and that new systems must emerge that are more consumer focused and directed towards preventive care. These sentiments are echoed in the recent Australia 2020 Summit with the Health Report from the Summit(7) featuring wellness as a major strategy directive for future health policy.
It seems clear that over the next few decades there are many factors that will impact on personal, community and global wellbeing. Changing global demographics along with major societal changes brought about by climate change and technological innovations such as telemedicine and initiatives such as Googlehealth (7) will forever change how humans live and implement wellness strategies. These changes bode well for the future of those in the wellness industry and hopefully for the future of our species.
New Wellness Related Initiatives in 2008
- • Launch of the Master of Wellness program at RMIT University
- • Publication of Understanding the Global Spa Industry
- Release of the Working Towards Wellness report at the World Economic Forum
- Establishment of the National Institute of Complementary Medicine
- Allocation of dedicated funding to Complementary Medicine by the NHMRC
- Establishment of the Australian Massage Research Foundation
- Release of the Australia 2020 Summit report
- Release of the Global Spa Economy Report
- Establishment of the Australian Teachers of Meditation Association n
References
- SRI International (2008), The Global Spa Economy 2007, Global Spa Summit, New York
- Cohen, M. & Bodeker, G. (Eds) (2008) Understanding the Global Spa Industry, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford
- Cohen, M. (2008) Wellness Spas and Human Evolution; In Cohen, M and Bodeker, G., (Eds) Understanding the Global Spa Industry, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford (2008)
- See http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/Wellness/index.htm
- PriceWaterHouseCoopers (2007) Working Towards Wellness: Accelerating the Prevention of Chronic Disease, World Economic Forum, available at: http://pwchealth.com/cgi-local/hregister.cgi?link _reg/wellness.pdf
- PriceWaterHouseCoopers (2005) HealthCast 2020: Creating a Sustainable Future, available at: www.pwc.com/il/heb/about/svcs/publication/alerts/2HealthCast_2020.pdf
- Good, M,& Roxon N., A long-term national health strategy: The Health Report from the Australia 2020 Summit available at:
http://www.australia2020.gov.au/final_report/index.cfm
- Googlehealth see https://www.google.com/health/p/ also see a 50 min video of Eric Schmidt at a healthcare conference outlining GoogleHealth features available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTZKNcx9sBA