Recovery coaching in an acute older people rehabiliation ward

Abstract

Our patient, carer, and staff feedback clearly tells us that elderly patients are frequently disempowered by acute care provision, environments, and attitudes. This debilitates individuals mentally and physically, reducing their independent functioning, and may mean that they require prolonged care or are unfit to return home.We developed the concept of “recovery coaching” to support acute inpatient elderly care rehabilitation. We designed a training intervention to achieve “coaching conversations” between our staff and our patients.Data were collected from 46 participants; 22 in the pre-intervention stage and 24 in the post-intervention stage. For the post-intervention patients, mean scores indicated that there was slightly higher increase in the patient's independence in terms of their Barthel (ADL) scores and that they reported higher feelings of self-efficacy. For this patient group it was also found that more returned home with the same level of care as on their admission, and that fewer patients required residential care placements at discharge.This innovative intervention allowed us to challenge the fundamental basis of “I do it for you” to “I will do it with you”, allowing the patient to become an integral partner in their health care.

A cluster-randomized controlled study to evaluate a team coaching concept for improving teamwork and patient-centeredness in rehabilitation teams

“…Interventions aiming to improve patient-centered care often focus on external participation or rather patient-professional interaction, e.g. shared decision-making [ 3 , 8 ] or health coaching [ 19 , 20 ]. However, it could also be shown that team interventions in health care have a positive impact on interprofessional teamwork [ 1 , 21 , 22 ].…”

Stepping Back and Listening

“…The analysis presented here demonstrates that a coaching approach can be highly successful in getting staff to think again about their interactions with patients and to focus on strategies that foster and establish independence, rather than on strategies that solve immediate problems. The usefulness of this approach is further supported by the analysis of our patient-data, which shows (for example) a significant reduction in additional care needs on discharge in patient groups who received the intervention, when compared with those who did not (see Kibble et al, 2014).…”

“…This coaching intervention was evaluated using a before-and-after design, where data were collected to assess the impact of recovery coaching on patients’ independent functioning and recovery, service improvements, and the staff. The quantitative data and full methodology of this evaluation have been reported elsewhere (Kibble et al, 2014).…”