Posts from — November 2010

Health Promotion incorporates many facets of our daily lives. From the amount of sleep to the water we drink, to the food that we eat and the activity that we maintain, our health is dependent upon many factors of our lifestyle.

Working to improve our wellness could be challenging to achieve on our own. That is why we can utilize the assistance of a health Coach.

What’s a wellness Coach?

A health coach is a highly educated professional who is trained in behavioral change. They hold degrees in Exercise Science, Health Education, Exercise Physiology, Counseling and Education.

A wellness coach helps individuals in recognizing current health concerns in addition to preventing future health related issues. These professionals work with customers in a variety of ways including; face-to-face, telephone, instant messaging and / or via email.

The latter of those is also referred to as electronic coaching and is the most efficient and cost effective method of working with a health Coach.

No matter what method is used for communication a wellness coach provides a customized program namely designed to address the needs and concerns of each individual customer.

Precisely how can a health coach help me?

Many person maintain several healthy habits in their lives. One person may  be a fitness enthusiast; another may abstain from alcohol and tobacco; while another might maintain a healthy daily diet.

Nevertheless, overall wellness is much like a puzzle, and a high level of health is only achieved when each piece of this puzzle is in place. A wellness coach will assist a personal in correcting his or her missing piece of the puzzle.

An online wellness coach may address the needs of sleep deprivation, stress management, diet, or any number of health related issues.  The wellness coach will motivate, guide, and provide valuable resources to provide customers with the necessary tools to make life changes.

How’s a health coach unique?

A health coach serves a distinctly different purpose than a fitness trainer, a counselor, or a supportive family member or friend. First, a health coach is an expert in his or her specific field.

When a client determines the need for a wellness coach he or she’ll complete a health risk assessment. Based on this assessment the client are going to be assigned a wellness coach namely selected to address his or her individual needs.

Next, a health coach is available electronically 24 hours per day. Through web-based communication customers have the opportunity to consult a health coach as much or as little as he may like.

Communication with a wellness coach may range from daily to weekly, and can occur by e-mail, journal or a combination of both. Lastly, a wellness coach is trained to assist in changing the way that the patron thinks and the way that they view themselves.

A health coach maintains the purpose of assisting the patron to work towards achieving a higher quality in life. This happens by addressing the cause of a certain problem rather than simply addressing the effects of a problem.

A health coach will help person recognize their needs, determine goals, and take the necessary steps towards achieving these goals.

While wellness are growing concerns in our daily lives, it could seem difficult to make the time to educate oneself and address the needs or our well being.

Working with the assistance of a health coach empowers us to focus on our specific needs and make progress towards changing.

Do you find it difficult to stay excited when attempting to make changes to your health? Are you aware that changes ought to be made in your daily life but you don’t know where to begin? If so then wellness coaching might just be the solution you’ve been seeking.

Wellness coaching is a service provided by trained specialists who work with you individually to help you reach your wellness objectives. Wellness coaching motivates, guides, and supports individual’s for reach sustainable behavioral changes by offering creative solutions to their problems.

Wellness coaching provides individually designed health promotion programs to meet your unique needs by focusing on physical, mental, and emotional health. They help you become proactive in your life by eliminating unhealthful behaviors and making wellness a priority.

Advantages of Health Promotion Coaching for Your Employees

Employees may benefit  from wellness coaching in a variety of ways. Health Promotion coaching can help person decrease major health risks in their lives by changing high risk behaviors.

Some of the many reasons why personnel work with wellness coaches are to get in shape, lose weight, reduce stress, quit smoking, and create balance in their lives. Health Promotion coaches assist individuals with current health problems in addition to preventing future health issues.

Because each wellness program that a wellness coach creates is unique to suit the needs of the customer, they can make certain that it will be a program that is right for them. Many busy employees mistakenly believe that they do not have the time for wellness coaching.

Fortunately wellness coaching professionals have the ability to provide their services in a selection of convenient ways. While electronic coaching through the use of e-mails and instant messaging has become a popular method as a result of its convenience, telephone and face-to-face interactions may also be used.

Workers have the ability to achieve their goals and improve their lives through the assistance of wellness coaching.

Benefits of Wellness Coaching for the Company

The overall advantages of wellness coaching for a corporation are remarkable. Employee high risk behaviors such as use of tobacco and obesity cost corporations millions of dollars every year.

These high risk behaviors often cause preventable illness and keep staff from coming to work. Wellness coaching guides, supports, hold patrons accountable, and ensures that they receive continued motivation to help them achieve their wellness objectives and eliminate unhealthful behaviors in their lives.

By implementing wellness programs and using wellness coaching in their businesses, corporations reduce the risk of avoidable disease in their businesses.

This improves the overall health of personnel, lowers healthcare and insurance costs, lowers absenteeism, and ultimately enhances performance and productivity.

When workforce experience the benefits of higher levels wellness in their lives it causes an betterment in job attitude, energy, and morale.

Organizations that utilize wellness coaching for their workforce experience the advantages of higher productivity.

In today’s fast paced world our busy lives leave little time, energy, or motivation for people  to focus on their own needs.

Those that do seek to improve their wellness traditionally turn to friends, family, specialists and published materials for support and information. All too often those support structures fail to make a lasting difference.

This happens for a number of reasons. Friends and family may not be capable of helping. Working with experts is time consuming and expensive and very few of us are effective at taking published, generic information and applying it to our own lives.

Gold’s Fitness Center Winston-Salem has created a new web-based wellness program that expands the range of support available to those wishing to make healthy lifestyle changes.

The health promotion program, Gold’s Gym Health Coach, focuses on the everyday challenges of making positive lifestyle changes and has the benefits of being more personalized and efficient than generic, published information and less intense and expensive than expert face-to-face counseling.

Utilizing a collaborative problem-solving model the goal is not to give advice, but rather to help person think through the issues and come to their own conclusions.

The coach offers ideas for consideration, assists the individual generate ideas of their own, assists the individual consider the various ideas, select a direction, and then supports them in the implementation of their decision.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that relationship formation requires in-person interaction; Gold’s Gym has found that members and coaches can easily build meaningful relationships via online communication.

Utilizing industry leading technology a Gold’s Gym Health Coach can offer members a secure, user-friendly personal website where they can access their coach in a real-time or via email with responses delivered in less than 24 hours.

The site authorizes coaches to hand choose relevant articles that are written on a consumer level and that are targeted to the issue at hand and add them to a member’s web-based personal library.

The site also contains various wellness programs and tools which are designed to assist the coach and member to set, implement and track specific goals.

The collaborative relationship formed between member and coach enhances the quality ice and efficiency of service.  The familiarity that a coach develops with a member’s circumstances and meaningful relationships permits them over time to more quickly offer useful ideas and assistance.

With traditional call-in assistance lines, the time intensive exercise of getting background and contextual information is repeated each time. IN that scenario efficiency is lost.

Moreover, Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach has created a protocol based on key principals from the field of psychotherapy and behavior modification.

The protocol is embedded within a proprietary problem-solving that is based on the concept that individuals  often act without a good understanding of a problem. Their responses then complicate matters and often make matters worse.

Gold’s Gym Health Coach offers the opportunity to step back, take a second look at what’s going on, and rapidly asses the factors influencing the situation. But, having an idea of “what” to do is very different than actually “doing” something about it.

People  need help with the follow-through. Also, after figuring out “what” to do, Gold’s Fitness Center Health Coach focuses on implementation.

Here Gold’s Fitness Center Health Coach builds on sound research and experience from the field of behavior modification that has to do with goal-setting and with implementation support.

The result is a highly customized, effective, user-friendly way of bettering the wellness of an individual.  The efficient nature of the online relationship allows Gold’s Gym Wellness Coach to keep the price point within reach of virtually whoever.

Information to evaluate your health promotion program comes from routinely collected screening and follow-up data of your health promotion program that look at process and outcomes of your program.

The Staff Member Medical Program has available a computerized case-management system which includes queries that allow easy assessment of process and outcome results at any point in time.

Process Evaluation

Process examination looks at the health promotion program’s impact as seen at various points in time.

Information that is accumulated from the various forms that wellness staff members fill out ought to supply you with the following -

• Just how many employees were screened?

• Just how many staff who were referred to a physician went?

• Exactly how many workers who expressed interest in wellness programs went?

• Exactly how many staff members who were referred to health promotion programs went?

• Exactly how many employees who went to health promotion programs completed them?

• How many personnel are in follow-up caseload?

You can use this kind of process evaluation to evaluate and learn about the health of your wellness program.

Wellness Program Outcome Examination

A central objective of the wellness program is to increase the health of personnel. Information on how to judge how well your wellness program is meeting this objective is called “outcome investigation” because you’re reviewing  the end results or outcome of your wellness program.

In health promotion programs, objectives are measured by specific (outcomes) behavior changes and reductions in health risk levels. Have personnel lowered their blood pressure? Have they lost weight? Are they exercising more? is alcohol consumption at a safe level?

For  instance these are the types of questions you are able to ask to determine when you’re reaching your objectives -  

• For workers with high blood pressure (140 / 90 or higher or on medication) at screening, what percentage have it under control (below 140 / 90) a year later?

• What’s the change in typical blood pressure (BP) levels among all workforce with high blood pressure (BP) 1 year after screening? Two years later?

• For personnel with high blood cholesterol levels (above 240) at screening, what percentage has decreased their cholesterol to borderline-high levels (200-239)?

• For workers with borderline-high blood cholesterol levels, what percentages have decreased their cholesterol to the desirable range (below 200)?

• What is the change in typical cholesterol levels among all workers with high and borderline-high blood cholesterol levels 1 year after screening? Two years later?

• For workforce who were overweight at screening, what percentage have lost 20 pounds or more a year later? Ten pounds or more? What is the average weight loss?

• For staff members who were smokers at screening, what percentages have quit smoking? for at least a year?

• For staff members whose level of alcohol consumption put them at-risk at screening, what percentage have quit drinking alcohol? Are consuming alcohol at levels considered safe by CDC guidelines? Have lowered their drinking, but are still at-risk?

• For personnel, what percentages are exercising at least three times a week for at least 20 minutes?

• If levels of fitness were measured, what percentages have improved fitness?

Make sure to set a regular time such as every 6 months to look at which staff your health promotion program is reaching and how effective it’s at helping them reduce their health risks. Use this information to make new decisions about how to direct your health promotion program efforts. Then make the change you need to improve your health promotion program.

Some might feel that examination is a frill; it’s not. Evaluation is a necessary part of a wellness program. You’ll need to know what’s working and what’s not.

Decision-makers who fund the wellness program need to be updated on the performance of the wellness program. Evaluation will provide you with necessary data to maintain and expand the wellness program and convince senior management to continue to support the wellness program.

The keys to a successful wellness program are persistent one-on-one outreach and follow-up counseling to encourage health improvement, adherence to treatment programs, changes in lifestyle behaviors, and to prevent relapse.

Periodic outreach and follow-up procedures provide staff with a safety net which keeps them involved in the health promotion program and avoids treatment dropout and relapse.

Counselors should follow up on workers at least every 6 months throughout the career of the employee at the worksite.  The objectives of follow-up are to -  

• Involve workforce who’ve health risks in treatment and risk reduction programs.

• Involve all staff members in health promotion programs and workplace-wide wellness activities.

• Support staff members in carrying out the risk reduction or health improvement activities they have chosen.

• Make sure to help staff members obey their treatment programs.

• Prevent relapse.

• Avoid staff from dropping out.

• Be certain to help employees maintain behavior changes.

Follow-up may be conducted in person, by phone, mail, and via computer if the technology is available. Most preferable is an in-person contact.

Computer programs which could do case load management are available to help counselors track information and perform follow-up.

Priorities for Follow-Up

Individuals  with multiple health risks should be at the top of the list. Individuals  in key positions like union leaders or department heads with health risks should also be contacted early so that they learn what the health promotion program is about and can share the information with others.

Individuals  who need a medical examination for high blood pressure (BP) or cholesterol should also be targeted early. Many workers will have seen their doctors so of the screening, but some will need more encouragement to do so. Those with no health risks may be followed up annually.

A follow-up counseling session can take 20 to 45 minutes.  At minimum, follow-up must include those who were told to seek medical evaluation for high blood pressure readings, high cholesterol readings, or borderline high blood cholesterol readings with 2 or more other risk factors.

It might include those who were identified as at-risk for one or more of the other major risk factors -  at-risk levels of alcohol consumption, being overweight, and having low HDL.

Follow-Up With Physicians

A letter (see forms) ought to be sent to the physician or clinic of each employee who’s high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or is under a physician’s care.

The letter ought to explain the wellness program and ought to include the employee’s relevant, current health measurements.

Along with the letter, send a self-addressed return envelope. Follow-up with the physician ought to be repeated every 6 months until it is determined that the employee is under satisfactory control.

Contacting the doctor is important for three reasons -

• The physicians receive employees’ health measurements taken at the workplace.

• You receive the blood pressure (BP) and cholesterol readings the physician takes and information on the treatment the physician prescribes.

Many times the worker doesn’t have this information or doesn’t remember it.  The information could be used when counseling the worker.

• Follow-up encourages doctors to pay closer attention to heart disease risk factors among their patients.

The menu approach offers workers a range of choices to support lifestyle changes. It permits people  to choose the kind of help that suits their schedules and preferences.

The four basic kinds of wellness programs include -

• Courses

• Minigroups

• Guided self help

• Individual counseling

Classes

Classes (8 or more) can be an effective means of providing education and social support for behavior change.  The length of a class can vary depending on topic requirements. It is not sufficient to offer only courses at a worksite.

Many workers are under time constraints with after work commitments and although they could be interested they simply can’t participate because of their schedules.

Employees might  be very eager to begin a wellness program but because of lack of participants to meet class quotas, the wellness program is canceled.

Many national businesses such as the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, Weight Watchers, etc. offer classes; you should have little trouble in identifying a provider for class kind wellness programs.

You could want to contact your local hospital, health department, or YMCA for possible choices. for selecting  a provider to provide a wellness program you could want to review the section on wellness program structure.

Minigroups

When there isn’t enough interest to develop a class, those who are interested in a given health topic may be formed into a minigroup (2 to 7).

The minigroup can cover the same content as a class but do so in a less formal manner. Presentation of information and discussion is the major format of the minigroup.

Guided Self-Help

Most workers don’t want formal help in making health changes; they prefer to do it on their own. In guided self-help, the wellness counselors provide support, materials, and encouragement.

Meeting times could be arranged and contact could be made either in individuals, by phone, or computer. Materials could be made available at the workplace, or mailed to the individual. Some workplaces now make information available via intranets or the Internet.

Individual Counseling

One of the most successful ways to help individuals change and improve their health status is counseling (or coaching) on a one-on-one basis.

In published studies, health promotion programs which incorporated individual counseling as part of the health promotion program process achieved significantly higher participation rates and achieved greater risk reduction/risk elimination than standard group programs. Studies have demonstrated that individual counseling is both cost effective and cost beneficial.

A wellness counselor must be trained in screening techniques, for in certain situations, they may be required to both screen individuals and counsel them. They should know how to do the following -  

• Review staff member health risks

• Contact employees who have health risks.

• Counsel staff on a one-on-one basis, assisting them set goals, solve problems, and get specialist help when they need it.

• Be certain to help staff members follow their treatment recommendations and make lifestyle and health behavior changes.

• Recruit workforce into health promotion programs, such as weight loss and use of tobacco cessation.

• Be sure to work with workforce on a one-on-one basis using guided self-help.

• Conduct classes and minigroups if necessary.

• Make certain to work with wellness committee members to plan and conduct workplace-wide wellness activities.

Health Promotion counselors are health generalists; they must have basic information about a wide range of health topics and health risks.

Counselors ought to be able to speak with workers about their medical problems and the treatments prescribed by their doctors.

They should have a good overview of nutrition, exercise physiology, pathophysiology of disease, pharmacology, psychology, and behavior modification skills.

The educational program should include approaches to stress awareness/reduction at the environmental level and at the individual level.

Social, physical, and organizational stressors ought to be explained and methods to ease or elevate stressors ought to be presented.

At the individual level how changes in attitudes and behaviors help one to cope with stressors; learning techniques to minimize stress response, such as meditation, relaxation response, and exercise.

Content of the program should provide the following -

• Identifying sources of stress

• Relationship of stress to health

• Exactly how the individual experiences stress, personal, family, work

• Solutions for coping and managing stress

• Techniques for decreasing stress

• Value of stress, both negative and positive

• Practical steps of incorporating stress reduction into lifestyle

Personnel conducting stress management programs should have training in psychology, behavioral sciences, or related disciplines such as mental health professionals, counselors, health educators, psychologists, and psychiatrists.

Training in a reputable program on how to teach the stress management course including group process skills is a must.

A nutrition education program should include a nutritional needs assessment, education counseling, and referral as necessary.

Educational sessions and materials should include the following information -

• The relationship of nutrition and chronic diseases

• Improving consuming patterns

• Relationship of nutrition and proper weight maintenance

• Exercise

• Stress

• Blood pressure

• Cholesterol

• Diabetes and other chronic illnesss.

• Nutritionally precise information regarding the relationship of health to diet, including cholesterol, fats, fiber, alcohol, carbohydrates, salt, sugar, and vitamin/mineral supplementation.

Methods for identifying healthier foods and incorporating low-calorie, high nutrient foods into consuming habits. Guidelines for improving consuming habits should be based on or consisitent with national recommendations like the Food Guide Pyramid.

Instructor ought to be a registered dietitian, registered nurse, or have a baccalaureate degree or higher in health education with training in nutrition.

If an allied health expert instructs the program, a consultation and review of the program design by a registered dietitian is recommended.

It is advised that tobacco use cessation programs subscribe to the Code of Practice for Smoking Cessation Programs.

Use of tobacco cessation programs must be multi-component with a focus on skills to build positive voluntary behavior modification practices.

Useful techniques include establishing reasons for quitting, understanding the tobacco use habit, various techniques for stopping and remaining a non-smoker, overcoming the problems of quitting, short-term goal establishing, weight control, stress management, importance of exercise, relationship of alcohol consumption to urges to smoke. Use no aversive or frighten tactics.

In wellness programs that use aids like the “patch” or medications like “Zyban” appropriate consultation should be available on the usage of these aids.

The instructor should have formal training in use of tobacco cessation from a nationally recognized organization like American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, or a nationally recognized commercial program like Smoke Enders.

Evaluation of success is sometimes very dubious in tobacco use cessation programs. Measurement of success should include participation rate, including the number beginning the program, the number completing the program, and the typical number per session.

Furthermore included, number and% who stopped use of tobacco after the program, and the number and% who had not resumed use of tobacco by the end of one year.

Participatory exercise plans ought to include education on advantages of regular physical activity and risks of a sedentary lifestyle, its impact on cardiovascular health and illnesses, its relationship with weight control and stress management, and aerobic activity options.

Discussion and practice of safe principles of exercise - warm up, cool down, frequency, intensity, duration, flexibility and strength components.  The health promotion program follows guidelines by the American College of Sports Medicine.

Safety precautions should include the following -

• Informed consent prior to starting exercise with clear and complete written and verbal instructions of possible risk, purpose of exercise, exercise format to be followed, opportunity for questions, and a signed informed consent with date.

• A screening/evaluation of participants to determine when medical examination is necessary for exercise like the Exercise Readiness Questionnaire (PAR-Q, see forms).

• Measurements of blood pressure (BP) and resting heart rate are useful screening information to determine exercise readiness.

• Participants who fail screening are medically referred and ought to obtain a written clearance from their doctor to exercise.    

• The basic content of an group fitness program ought to include -     

Warm up   5 - 10 minutes

Aerobic exercise   20 - 40 minutes

Cool down   5 - 10 minutes

Exercise instructors should’ve education and training in exercise physiology, physical education, physical therapy or comparable discipline, or possess a current certification by a nationally recognized sports medicine or exercise association, and be CPR licensed.