Coaching for Health: Why It Works and How to Do It

Book excerpt: This book has a radical new message for any clinician: through coaching you reduce your own stress and you get far better outcomes for patients. ‘Coaching for health’ means creating a different relationship in consultations, asking a different kind of question and giving information in a different way. It goes beyond what is usually meant by ‘patient-centred practice’. It will work with virtually any patient. When you take a coaching approach the chances are that your patients gain confidence in managing their own health, reduce the number of appointments they request, are less likely to need emergency admissions and are more likely to take their medication. Coaching is not just a technique that you switch on and off, it is a wholly different mindset. Coaching for Health explains the rationale for a coaching approach and gives pragmatic step by step help on how to do it. The authors - one an executive coach, one a doctor - write from their extensive, collective experience. Having trained many hundreds of clinicians in coaching skills, Jenny Rogers and Arti Maini have seen firsthand how transforming it can be to use in practice.