Health Behavior Change

Useful basics for any professional whose work with patients requires cooperation. Health practitioners working to improve their ability to assess, motivate, and educate patients as partners for better health outcomes will want to read this honest, practical yet reflective book twice - and then again - while trying out its ideas, practicing, and growing into its approach to care. Useful both for persons in training and already in practice.

Health Behavior Change dramatically simplifies and expands the Motivational Interviewing counseling style techniques underlined in Motivational Interviewing by Miller and Rollnick (1991). Health Behavior Change is very easy to read and provides a practical menu of "tools" that could assist individuals thinking and/or committed to behavioral change. Although the authors' targets are medical professionals, the book is a must for everyone involve in health care promotion and/or counseling (prevention workers, outreach workers, treatment advocates, drug and alcohol counselors, psychotherapists). It is also a great book to pass along to family members and anyone concerned in assisting others to move in the direction of change. The most important message: when we are moving in the direction of behavioral change, we need helpers who care, remain non-judgmental and help us tip the balance towards healthier behaviors. Assisting people to set their own realistic goals --however small, is crucial to facilitate meaningful, long lasting change. Love this book!!!!HIV Service Provider and Trainer, San Francisco Bay Area, CA

I am a nurse who has worked in the areas of AIDS Counseling and testing, Family Planning and now drug abuse prevention in a school. Sometimes I am called upon to talk to students and "get them worried" about their drug and alcohol use. Much of what I read felt too coercive with students and, in practice, evoked much resistance. This book contains readily applicable techniques for helping your hear your clients concerns better so that you do understand their behavior in the context of their real lives and allows you to help move them toward concern and possibly behavior change. This should be a book included in ALL nursing curricula because of it's readily hands-on use capacity. Surely, reading and applying the book has been a processs (and much like behavior change itself) not a quick fix application. Great stuff.

Many of the chronic illnesses and other problems that cause people to seek health care are closely linked to behavioral patterns related to issues such as diet, exercise, smoking, drinking, and stress. Treatment is often addressed to acute care without helping patients examine and change the underlying behaviors. There are good reasons why this is so. Managed care increasingly limits the amount of time that medical professionals can spend with patients. Many doctors, nurses, and other health professionals feel unprepared or frustrated about changing patient behavior patterns. Indeed, medical training usually provides little guidance in how to help patients change health behaviors.In this clearly written and highly practical little book, Rollnick and his colleagues offer a range of effective methods that can be used within the context and time constraints of primary or specialist care. The goal is not to turn doctors and nurses into counselors or psychotherapists. Rather, they argue persuasively that there is much that can be done within medical practice to help patients change the behavior patterns that bring them back again and again to the doctor's office. The methods are well-described, and derived from research on effective brief interventions for behavior change.