Healthcare is not only about offering the best possible medical solutions for ailments. Healthcare professionals will also need to educate their customers on a regular basis about maintaining a healthier lifestyle in order to avoid falling sick again. This can be done via the right motivational tools, some of which are given below.
Why is Motivation Needed?
Sadly, a lot of individuals with the wish to adopt a healthier lifestyle via diet control and physical activities find it hard to continue these behaviors in the long run. Most of them fall back into the dangerous loop a sedentary lifestyle after failing to make these behaviors a permanent part of their lives.
This is where a healthcare professional can aim to make a change. With the right motivational tools, a healthcare professional can ensure that his/her customer stays focused on the road to a healthier life.
Some Motivational Tips That Will Help
- Choose a Target Behavior That Benefit’s the Patient’s Health
Rather than choosing a single behavior for all customers, follow a more individualized approach to charting out your customer’s behavior chart. For instance, some customers may prefer strenuous activities like weight lifting while others may prefer lighter alternatives like jogging or swimming.
Discuss the various aspects of the behavior chart with each customer and devise an appropriate plan taking into account the customer’s perception of the same. While doing so, ascertain the customer’s willingness to change and just how much focused the latter is on achieving these goals.
Do not advocate change if the resistance is high. Rather, empathize with the customer, understand his/her personal motivations and constraints and gently encourage him/her to weigh the pros and cons of his/her current behavior as well as a changed one.
- Set Achievable Goals
Unattainable or long term goals only serve to dishearten a customer who has never exercised of dieted before. Hence, you will need to draw up a plan with goals that can be easily attained over a period of time. This time interval should not be more than two weeks.
The customer will be more than willing to work towards achieving these goals if they are easily reachable. Once a routine is set, you can move ahead to harder, long term goals without any issues.
- Provide a Clear Direction
While customers remain focused inside a treatment or rehabilitation center, they tend to get distracted outside the facility. This may make it harder for customers to recall the correct way of performing the exercises that were taught to them at the facility.
The best way to thwart this scenario is to introduce these exercises during scheduled meetings itself. You can start off with small, minor exercises the customer can practice in your office during these meetings.
Starting these exercises at the beginning of the meeting will also provide the customer with ample time to practice them and ask questions if needed. You can also choose to hand out written or printed instructions to help them recall these exercises at home so that the customer can achieve slow but definite progress with them same with time.
- Provide Easy Access to External Help
Your customers are bound to come across several barriers while adopting a healthier lifestyle. There may be instances when they are doubtful of proceeding without further consent, or may have a query to address, but cannot reach you. In this case, you will need to provide easy access to the information they may need via external resources.
In addition to maintaining contact, providing feedback and monitoring their progress, you will need to provide the necessary materials they can rely on when needed. These include written instructions, printed handouts or even computer generated materials.
- Provide Incentives
No one likes to work for nothing these days. Your customers will be more inclined to follow their behavioral chart and stick to a healthy lifestyle if you keep on rewarding them for their efforts every now and then.
These incentives need to be patient centric as well and individually planned to attract each customer to the program. These personalized incentives will definitely keep your customers on the right track in the days to come.
A healthcare professional will need to motivate his/her customer to adopt a healthier lifestyle apart from simply tending to the latter’s ailments. These motivational tips will help healthcare professionals keep their customers fixated on the goal to lead a healthier life in the years to come.]]>