Pharmacists in health coaching: Raising the standard of excellence for our patients’ consultations
UK PHARMACISTS carry out over one million consultations a week at an average on 5.3 minutes per session, according to the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee in a nationwide audit conducted last year. So why are adherence rates still a major concern?
The Institute for Functional Medicine defines health coaches as people who help patients set goals and provide achievable steps and strategies for them to maintain healthy changes long term. As pharmacists, aren’t we doing this already? you may ask. So why are so many of our patients not committing to the advice and education we provide them?
Try these three tips utilising coaching techniques in your next consultations:
EXPLORE WHAT MOTIVATES THEM!
This is essentially identifying the patients’ ‘why’ and using that to motivate them to initiate change for themselves. Coaching the patient enables you to hold the space for them to facilitate change, while exploring their deeper values.
This can be achieved by:
• Engaging with patients; asking those openended questions to allow self-exploration.
• Guiding our patients with their permission on the next steps ‘they’ want to take that will support their health goal; and providing the resources necessary.
• Evoking the ‘change talk’ from our patients and recognising how confident they are to make that change. You can ask, ‘On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you to make this change?’
• Planning together to co-create patient-led goals, assisting them to strength their commitment to the change and providing accountability along the way.
LESS TELLING AND MORE COACHING!
I am sure we have all told our patients to do something and they didn’t do it. According to a study published in the National Institute of Health 2018, adherence rates for most medications for chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension usually fall in the 50-60 per cent range. So how can we raise the bar? Providing educational support relating to our patients in a non-judgemental, collaborative manner not only improves their health journey experience with us, it also is the tipping point from which change is facilitated rather than coerced.
By making small adjustments in our discussions around sharing knowledge, listening, asking questions and problem-solving, we can ensure the “agenda is led by the patient” and they ultimately have the solution. Instead of viewing our patients as each one of them has a problem we need to solve, the patient is ultimately in the driver’s seat of their health, and we facilitate the journey. Example of this would be, “How might your life be different if you lost the weight that you’ve been trying to lose?”, instead of, “You need to lose weight! This is what you need to do!”
PRIORITISE THE POSITIVE!
Picture this, you manage to grab five minutes to speak with your patient to discuss the medication and you ask them, “How have you been getting on?”, and they start telling all the things that are going bad or what they haven’t achieved, or what isn’t going well with them and that’s natural! It is important for us to prioritise what is going ‘well’ with our patients and reframe it to drive positive change and encouragement to help the patient overcome any setbacks. Focus on and remind them of their strengths, such as bravery or perseverance, and explore how they can use them to overcome any obstacle that may arise. As pharmacists, our goal is to “positively impact the patient’s life”, and coaching them can help us achieve this
MAKE EVERY INTERACTION COUNT!
Raising the standard of excellence in our consultations, no matter how short the time, means making every discussion a patient-centred one. There are currently 128,000+ health coaches worldwide, with rapid growth within the industry projected to be valued at $27 billion by 2030, according to Marketdata LLC 2020, and I believe pharmacists are poised to be the gold standard in this space.
Let’s collaborate with our patients to create engagement in improving their health, increasing awareness of their role in managing their own health, supporting them to become active participants in their care and take responsibility for their health.
SHEREE-ANN ABRAHAMS, BPharm Hons Pharmacist | Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach Candidate | Health & Wellness Consultant | Founder of The Chia Lifestyle https://www.thechialifestyle.com/