Health-Care Collective Offers Gift Certificates

A $20 gift certificate can be redeemed for a personalized lifestyle and nutritional analysis, a chair massage, body oils or a selection of other goods and services.

A $45 certificate offers a choice of a personalized plaster face mask, a full-body aromatherapy massage and a half-dozen other gifts.

These gift certificates are the latest venture of a group of Ventura County health professionals who have joined together to offer a more user-friendly approach to health care.

Three therapists, a chiropractor, a holistic health practitioner and a fitness expert have formed a collective called “Connections: A Health Center Without Walls.” Members of the group, which fluctuates in size, refer clients to one another, host health-care conferences and classes and sell their gift certificates, priced at $8 to $45.

“The gifts are intended to promote healthy giving,” said Joyce Lombard, a Ventura psychotherapist and co-administrator of the group. “The gift catalog is a vehicle for [the practitioners] to list together. If you pick up a gift certificate catalog in my office, you see the other people advertised. We promote as a group and it’s synergistic.”

Connections members, currently all located west of the Conejo Grade, work out of their own offices and use their own health insurance providers. “We’re an alliance of professionals,” Lombard said. “We’re not in business together.”

However, Lombard said, the joint effort demonstrates to clients and potential clients a cooperative rather than competitive approach to health care.

“In any kind of culture that gets real mechanistic and competitive,” she said, “you need to balance with things that are more humanized and cooperative.”

Patty Van Dyke, a Ventura psychotherapist and art therapist and a founding member of Connections, said the alliance is intended to demystify health care.

“Health care is so confusing and strenuous, with primary physicians and provider lists. We are hoping to have something that’s just simpler,” she said. “There is a need to have more and more types of health care that are easily accessible to everybody.”