Health Coaching

Health Coaching

In addition to being a registered physiotherapist, your clinician has also undergone training in Health Coaching techniques. This information explains what Health Coaching is.

What is Health Coaching?

Health Coaching is an approach that guides and supports people to be active participants in managing their own health conditions. In other words, it aims to make sure that you are involved in making decisions about your health and how you manage it.

What is different about Health Coaching?

Traditionally, doctors and therapists would have simply told patients what to do when it comes to their health. It is now understood that most of this advice is only followed about 10% of the time, making it not particularly effective. This is not because people involved are lazy or cannot be bothered, usually it is because there are practical reasons that make the advice hard to follow, such as difficulties with time, money or other commitments; or because the advice does not fit with what might be important to you.

Health Coaching involves your physiotherapist working with you to help you to identify the things that you yourself feel able to do to improve your health condition. Making decisions together is much more effective than simply being told what to do.

Why is Health Coaching a good idea for me?

For many health conditions, such as back, knee or neck pain, what you do yourself is as important, if not more important, than what your physiotherapist does. To get the best results, working together with your physiotherapist where you explore what you can do to help yourself, alongside what your physiotherapist might also think would help, is the winning combination.

In other words, if you rely on your physiotherapist to come up with all the ideas and make all the decisions, you may find that the results aren’t as good as they could be. Health Coaching is a way of inviting you to identify the changes that will work best for you, and alongside your physiotherapist, work towards managing your health complaint.

What sort of changes are we talking about?

This varies from person to person as we are all different. The point of Health Coaching is to help you to work out what is best for you. It is likely that most health complaints can be better managed if we are a bit fitter, manage our stress better or get a little more sleep, and it could be that Health Coaching helps explore how these might be fitted into your rehabilitation programme.