Improving health behaviors is fundamental to preventing and controlling chronic disease. Healthcare providers who have a patient-centered communication style and appropriate behavioral change tools can empower patients to engage in and sustain healthy behaviors. This review highlights motivational interviewing and mindfulness along with other evidence-based strategies for enhancing patient-centered communication and the behavior change process. Motivational interviewing and mindfulness are especially useful for empowering patients to set self-determined, or autonomous, goals for behavior change. This is important because autonomously motivated behavioral change is more sustainable. Additional strategies such as self-monitoring are discussed as useful for supporting the implementation and maintenance of goals. Thus, there is a need for healthcare providers to develop such tools to empower sustained behavior change. The additional support of a new role, a health coach who specializes in facilitating the process of health-related behavior change, may be required to substantially impact public health.
There is great need for cost effective approaches to increase patient engagement and improve health and well-being. Health and wellness coaching has recently demonstrated great promise, but the majority of studies to date have focused on individual coaching (ie, one coach with one client). Newer initiatives are bringing a group coaching model from corporate leadership development and educational settings into the healthcare arena. A group approach potentially increases cost-effective access to a larger number of clients and brings the possible additional benefit of group support. This article highlights some of the group coaching approaches currently being conducted across the United States. The group coaching interventions included in this overview are offered by a variety of academic and private sector institutions, use both telephonic and in-person coaching, and are facilitated by professionally trained health and wellness coaches as well as trained peer coaches. Strengths and challenges experienced in these efforts are summarized, as are recommendations to address those challenges. A working definition of “Group Health and Wellness Coaching” is proposed, and important next steps for research and for the training of group coaches are presented.
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