Benefits of Health Coaching

What is Health Coaching?

Health coaching is an umbrella term used to describe many different interventions that ‘coach’ or actively support people to self-manage. It helps patients move away from a dependent care model to one that is personalised, empowering and based around a person’s own aspirations and goals.

The main benefits of Health Coaching:

• It helps people gain knowledge, skills and confidence to become active participants in their own care so they can reach self-identified health and wellbeing goals
• It raises awareness and increases responsibility for health and wellbeing
• It supports someone to change their relationship with how they manage their health and care
• It requires a change in how health and care practitioners communicate

Ultimately, health coaching is a combination of practitioner skills plus behaviour change assistance. It aims to raise awareness and responsibility of the person for their own health and wellbeing, achieved through a transformation in the practitioner/service user relationship. The whole concept is based on strong provider communication and negotiation skills, informed service user-defined goals, conscious choices, exploration of the consequences of decisions, and user accountability for decisions made.

A health coaching approach sees people as truly resourceful, as an equal in the practitioner-service user relationship, and as the holders of the solutions to the challenges that they face. The practitioner’s role is to provide expert information when it is required, and act as a mechanism to support the setting of meaningful health and social goals and the framing of conversations in which a person is supported to make decisions about their own life.