Health Coaching

What is health coaching?

Health coaching is a supported self-management intervention and is part of the NHS Long Term Plan’s commitment to make personalised care business as usual across the health and care system. Health coaching means helping people gain and use their knowledge, skills, and confidence to become active participants in their care so that they can reach their self-identified health and wellbeing goals.

Health Coaching Development of health coaching skills focuses on training health and social care staff, voluntary sector representatives, and carers to use health coaching skills as part of consultations or conversations. This involves supporting practitioners to develop their own health coaching skills, conversation frameworks and mind-set, so they can use a health coaching approach in their daily role to support Personalised Care and encourage self-management and Shared Decision Making.

Health coaching is a partnership between health and care staff/practitioners and clients/patients. It guides and prompts people to change their behaviour, so they can make healthcare choices based on what matters to them. It also supports them to become more active in their health and care.

Health coaching is defined in Universal Personalised Care as:

"Helping people gain and use the knowledge, skills and confidence to become active participants in their care so that they can reach their self-identified health and wellbeing goals.’’

There are two approaches to using health coaching:

  1. Health coaching services - health coaching as a new stand-alone service targeting a specific group (e.g., supporting healthy behaviour changes in relation to specific conditions such as diabetes).
  2. Health coaching skills - training health and social care staff and voluntary sector representatives or carers to use Health coaching skills as part of their consultations or conversations, as an approach to practice or mind-set. Health coaching skills can be used to enhance an existing service, as part of wider workforce development.

Examples of how health coaching skills are used in wider workforce development:

Health coaching in an acute setting:

  • Managing frequent attenders

  • Changing conversations about pain management injections
  • Increasing participation in exercises in outpatient clinics
  • Achievable goal setting led by people medicines concordance on a ward
  • at discharge and at dispensary
  • Supporting increase in sense of control after surgery
  • Aligning clinical objectives with patient rehabilitation goals

Health coaching in a primary care setting:

  • Frameworks for changing a conversation
  • Management of long-term conditions
  • Lifestyle and behaviour change
  • Supporting personalised care planning
  • Recovery and rehabilitation
  • Concordance and agreement with treatments
  • Pain management
  • Procedural and functional skill development
  • Mental health (if well managed)

Health coaching in in a social care and voluntary sector setting:

  • Working with carers
  • Social prescribing
  • Encouraging engagement with services
  • Supporting return to work
  • Supporting participation in community activities
  • Increasing exercise
  • Addressing loneliness
  • Supporting recovery from drug and alcohol addiction
  • Managing expectations about housing service provision

What are the benefits of health coaching?

The benefits of health coaching include:

  • Helping patients/clients gain the knowledge, skills and confidence to become active participants in their care so that they can reach their self-identified health and wellbeing goals.
  • Raising awareness and increasing responsibility for health and wellbeing
  • Supporting a patient/client to change their relationship with how they manage their health and care.

If patients/clients are more activated and can better manage their long-term conditions, it can reduce the amount of visits to both general practice and emergency departments.

Two day face-to-face Health Coaching Core Skills course 

The two day Core Skills in Health Coaching course is designed to support colleagues / practitioners/health professionals from all health, care, community and voluntary sectors to learn how to use health coaching effectively in their current roles to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence needed to integrate health coaching into their current roles to support personalised care.

The course provides the opportunity to develop a broad understanding of the principles of health coaching and behaviour change, while providing a practical set of tools that the participant can apply immediately in their own working role.

The course looks at working with resistance, looking at blind spots and working with motivation. The purpose is to provide a range of approaches in helping people think differently about their situation.

Health coaching supports organisations to improve their coaching and leadership skills, so that the organisations can maintain their connection to the people and communities that they serve, positively impacting the health and wellbeing of the population.

Who is the target audience for Health Coaching training?

Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) roles:

  • Clinical pharmacist
  • Pharmacy technician
  • Social prescribing link worker
  • Health and wellbeing coach
  • Care co-ordinator
  • Physician associate
  • First contact physiotherapists
  • Dieticians
  • Podiatrists
  • Occupational therapists
  • Mental health practitioner
  • Paramedic
  • Nursing associate

Frontline acute practitioners / community teams

  • Health visitors
  • Midwives
  • Optometrists
  • Occupational therapists
  • Palliative care workers
  • Physiotherapists
  • Podiatrists
  • Speech and language therapists
  • District nurses
  • Intermediate care workers
  • Specialist nurses (e.g., diabetes, heart failure, incontinence, tissue viability)

Other

  • Commissioned VCSFE who are delivering behaviour change programmes
  • Social workers
  • Health visitors
  • School nurses
  • Sexual health services
  • Dental

Course structure

The course is generally structured as two separate day-long workshops for between 16-20 participants, delivered a week or two apart to allow participants to practice their developing skills. Prior to the workshop participants are registered and sent an electronic reflective briefing pack.

Course content

This is a highly interactive course with an emphasis on skill practice and development. The course is delivered using a highly participative and experiential learning process supported by expert input.

Elements covered include:

  • Structuring conversations with clients/service users using a coaching approach.
  • Understanding the psychological basis of coaching and its application in health and care settings.
  • Active listening, effective questioning and supportive challenge skills.
  • Building trust and rapport and the implications for behaviour change.
  • The core concepts and principles of Personalised care, Shared Decision Making, Patient activation, health behaviour change, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and assets-based approaches.
  • A wide range of health coaching tools, techniques, skills and mind-sets.

Further details including content can be found at https://tpchealth.com/health-coaching/health-coaching-training-programmes/core-skills-in-health-coaching/

The two day Health Coaching Core Skills course content is developed and owned by TPC Health who have led the development of health coaching, person centred coaching and the clinical application of coaching within Health and Care system since 2008.

The two day Health Coaching Core Skills courses are delivered by the Lancashire and South Cumbria Population Health Academy, Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB and Active Lancashire for the benefit of Lancashire and South Cumbria population, to assist and support people to become more active in their own health and care.

The two day Health Coaching workshops are delivered by health coaching trainers who have been accredited by TPC Health to deliver the TPC Health Coaching Core Skills Programme. This course is accredited by the Personalised Care Institute.

Two day face-to-face Health Coaching Core Skills courses are currently being delivered on a monthly basis across areas in Lancashire and South Cumbria.

There are sixteen places per cohort. All applications are registered on a first come, first serve basis.

If you would like further details of course availability, please e-mail:
workforcetraining@activelancashire.org.uk.

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