Customized health coaching solutions can reach, engage, and motivate individuals to make lasting healthy lifestyle changes through tools such as motivational interviewing and SMART goal setting. When participants focus on their preferred area, they are more likely to implement change. Health coaches often play an underappreciated but vital role in the continuum of care
Health coaches explore unhealthy high-risk factors with their participants and help them understand why it may be important to work on one first over another, but would not force a participant to focus on something they do not want to work on. By putting participants in the “driver’s seat” of their own well-being, they learn how and why making certain lifestyle changes benefits them, both professionally and personally. Occupational health professionals often have limited access or insufficient time to provide education and reduce risk factors, such as weight management.
This is where coaches can play an integral part in follow-up, whether it is working with patients on medication compliance strategies or ensuring they are adhering to their prescribed cardiac rehabilitation exercise programs. Health coaching dives into not only physical wellness, such as weight management and physical activity but also social and emotional wellness. By helping an individual learn effective coping and stress management techniques as well as adequate sleep habits, they are more likely to stay safe and injury-free while on the job.
Workers in industries such as transportation, manufacturing, and construction must meet specified health parameters to be dependable employees and continue working. Health Coaching is a useful tool for employers to utilize to help these employees continuously pass their DOT and OSHA requirements. This allows workers the resources to speak openly and confidentially about both their areas of concern and improvement. Health coaching provides them with the tools they need to learn how to better manage their conditions and make lasting lifestyle changes.
Whether it is through chat, email, Skype, or in person, health coaches can meet on the employee’s terms and his or her readiness to change. Due to the remote nature of health coaching, it is also simple and cost-effective to provide employees with night and weekend availability for coaching sessions. Healthcare is constantly changing, and with employers’ focus shifting to a preventive model, health coaching is at the forefront of positive behavior change with the intention of decreasing costs while increasing health literacy and engagement.
Employees in all industries benefit from regular sessions with a nationally certified health coach. From the busy truck driver on the road struggling to manage his weight to the construction worker trying to make sense of a new medication, health coaches help people not only manage their chronic conditions but also stay healthy in the first place. National health coach certifications are earned by nurses, registered dietitians, personal trainers, behavior specialists, and stress management experts. Through continuing education, healthcare professionals stay up to date on the latest behavior modification tools for their individual discipline, as well as health coaching.
For additional information, contact Stewart Levy at slevy@NAOHP.com
In 2016, researchers with the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, published a study on the long-term benefits of health coaching.
- They found that health coaching has been shown to improve outcomes in patients with cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension.
- The authors also concluded that “most improved clinical outcomes persisted one year after the completion of the health coaching intervention.”
Source: Annals of Family Medicine
