Lifeworld led care wellbeing, and the 5th wave of public health.

Abstract

A recent paper has made the case for a `fifth wave` of public health action. The paper articulated the first four waves as focusing on civil engineering, the germ theory of disease, welfare reforms and lifestyle issues. This paper will focus on well-being and will expand on the authors articulation of a current need to “discover a new image of what it is to be human” in order to begin to address the challenges of promoting well-being. This paper will consider an alternative way of viewing human beings within a `caring` context and how this alternative view may aid this potential fifth wave of public health action. This alternative view has emerged from the work of Husserl who suggested that any human view of the world without subjectivity has excluded its basic foundation. The phenomenological understanding of `lifeworld` is articulated through five elements, temporality, spaciality, intersubjectivity, embodiment and mood which are all discussed here in more detail. A world of colours, sparkling stars, memories, happiness, joy, anger and sadness. It is this `lifeworld` which when health care or as argued in this paper public health become overly focused on decontextualised goals and measuring quality superficially can be neglected.