Helping Patients Change Behaviour Flashcards
What are health behaviours?
Behaviours that are related to the health status of the individual
What factors influence health behaviour?
Threat: awareness of danger or potential threat
Fedr: emotional arousal by perceived relevant threat
Barriers: preventing response/behaviour
Benefits: positive reward consequence
Subjective norms: the view of others + how relevant
Attitudes: evaluation/beliefs about behaviour
Response efficacy: perception of response in preventing threat
Cognitions: awareness of thoughts + perception
Intentions: plans to carry out response/behaviour
Cues to action: external + internal factors that influence decision making
Why do humans resist change?
Creatures of habit
Simply giving information ineffective (need dialogue)
Short-term vs long-term
(short-term difficulty -> long-term benefit)
Motivation
What is behaviourism?
Scientific study of how reward + punishment (stimuli) affect emotion + behaviour (response)
Empirical approach: vary contingencies of reward + punishment + measure effect on behaviour
Behaviour is a conditioned response occurring in presence of stimuli
If learnt, it can also be unlearned/modified through conditioned learning
What is operant conditioning? Explain the Skinner experiment to back this up.
Rats/pigeons hit food pellet in box by accident + was getting food so learnt to press it on purpose to get food
= we behave to get a reward
What is classical conditioning? Explain the Pavlov and Watson experiment to back this up.
Pavlov: dogs would salivate in presence of person presenting their food so started off ringing a bell (unconditioned) but then associated it with food -> even when food was took away, the bell made the dogs salivate
Watson: young child was not scared of cuddly white rat so they rang a loud + distressing noise when the rat was presented -> when bell was removed rat instilled fear in child
= associated learning
How is operant conditioning relevant to medicine?
Positive reinforcement vs punishment
Behaviour change: health care professionals
Unhelpful positive reinforcement e.g. chronic pain
What is the behaviour wheel used for?
Systematic way of designing + implementing interventions to support patients behavioural change -> if the intervention works we want to roll it out to the NHS and influence policy + guidelines
What is the COM B model?
States that Behaviour is influenced/influences 3 factors:
- Capability
- Opportunity
- Motivation
(they influence eachother too)
Don’t need to target all 3 in an intervention -> target one that is main resistance to change
What is capability?
Physical: ability to engage in behaviour e.g. movement exercises
Psychological: need to understand why they should change their behaviour
What is motivation?
Automatic: inner desire we have at subconscious level (innate)
Reflective: decision making aspect
Both heavily influenced by a wide variety of factors
What is opportunity?
Do they have opportunity to engage in behavioural change? Do they have access to interventions + the time? Where are the interventions?
What are the steps of behaviour change in practice?
- Define behavioural problem
- What target behaviour will address problem?
- A clear plan of when + how patient will perform target behaviours + exactly what they need to change? Who else is involved?
- Assess using COM-B framework i.e. capability, opportunity + motivation
- Reflect, evaluate, monitor + adapt if necessary (could be positive reinforcement e.g. you have not failed)
What are social cognition theories? What are the 3 types?
Attempt to explain relationship between social cognitions (e.g. beliefs, attitudes, goals etc.) + behaviour
- Health belief model
- Theory of planned behaviour
- Transtheorectical model
What is the Health-Belief Model (HBM)?
Perceived susceptibility + perceived severity -> perceived threat
Perceived benefits + perceived barriers -> perceived efficacy
Perceived threat + perceived efficacy -> influence health behaviour
