Generally, nurse health coaches help patients meet their health and personal goals. They also help patients focus on their mental and physical well-being through holistic and conventional treatments methods. Better still, they are responsible for identifying major health concerns and assisting patients in working through them.
To become a nurse coach, it’s imperative to know their roles and duties. Consider the following:
Identify Patients’ Opportunities and Needs
Patients’ have various needs varying from spiritual, cultural or traditions, confidence, information, communication, and self-care or support needs. Some might be suffering from critical conditions that make it hard to manage them.
However, the nurse health coaches have to identify their patients’ various needs and provide opportunities to help improve different conditions.
Assist Patients’ In Establishing Goals and Empower Them to Reach Their Goals
Depending on the condition and treatment plan, patients may have the goal to improve the quality of their treatment or care, reduce the cost of care and improve their general health outcome.
But, meeting such goals would be challenging, especially for those patients living with terminal diseases. Sometimes, they would even forget to take their medicines, leave alone cope with their conditions.
So, a health nurse coach will help patients change or adopt new lifestyles that help achieve their various goals. They’ll teach patients how to set realistic goals and work towards achieving them. In other words, their major would help facilitate the participation of patients in their plan or bid for great care.
Structure the Coaching Interaction
Coaching interaction plan is the strategies health nursing coaches use to train, motivate and improve their patients’ care. Nurses can deploy various techniques to strengthen or enhance their patients’ needs. Amongst the structural strategies include;
- Making lifestyle change habits and helping patients to adjust to the changes
- Establishing patients’ weaknesses and strengths; for them to adequately help their patients, nurses have the duty of understanding the patients and what they can do to better their health.
- Locate and appreciate areas of improvement. They are determining the patients’ weaknesses to help spot areas to improve and understand their progress.
- Determining any obstacles the patients face is a way of improving their care or what’s holding them back.
- They are then providing possible solutions to help patients overcome their obstacles.
Ensures Patients’ Holistic Wellness
Qualified nurse coaches should have the various treatment and patient management tools and skills at their disposal. And to help in the general health and well-being of their patients, coaching nurses need to incorporate both lifestyle and medical treatment to ensure the patient gets a whole treatment.
Some lifestyle change treatment plans include; guiding patients on quality exercises like meditation and mindfulness, self-acceptance, and social relationships and teaching patients the benefits of taking the right foods or maintaining balanced diets and avoiding alcohol, among other substances that would ruin their lives.
Conclusion
Health nurse coaches are responsible for taking care of their patients over health, physical and emotional support. The duties and responsibilities above should those planning to become a health nurse coach identify the activities that await them.