Individual-level health psychology interventions Flashcards
What is health psychology?
Focused on how our thought processes, emotions, and behaviours impact on our physical health:
How psychology leads us to develop or not develop health conditions?
- Poor diet, MMR vaccination uptake
Once having health condition, psychology affects whether we get better or not - Communication between patients and healthcare professionals
‒ help-seeking
‒ learning new skills, understanding diagnoses
May provide training to other healthcare professionals
- Understanding of theoretical models – explanations for the uptake (or not) of certain behaviours
- overlaps here with mental health- having problems with mental health may lead to person performing unhealthy behaviour, long term physical health condition, cause them to experience anxiety/ depression
Focus of Mental health
CBT, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, family therapy, counselling
Focus of Health Psychology
beliefs, behaviour, behaviour change, sense-making, quality of life
What does a health psychologist do?
promote well-being and understand physical illness using their knowledge
trained to help people deal with the psychological and emotional aspects of health and illness
Help promote healthier lifestyles and try to find ways to encourage people to improve their health
Help improve the healthcare system
Work in variety of settings including hospital and community settings, research, public health
Process of what health psychologists
‒ Assess participant’s health in relation to the behaviour and type of action needed.
‒ Ensure intensity of intervention matches person’s need for support to change behaviour
‒ Discuss with the participant what the impact of changing their behaviour might be
‒ Review progress
Individual-level behaviour change
Different levels of intensity, depending on the level of risk to the individual
Interventions of individual-level behaviour change
Brief interventions
Make Every Contact Count) initiative
Extended or intensive interventions
Brief interventions
delivered by any healthcare professional to motivate people to change behaviours damaging health
MECC (Make Every Contact Count) initiative
any healthcare professional talking with a patient should discuss harmful substances and eating.
Extended or intensive interventions
delivered by behaviour change specialists (e.g. Health Psychologists) to people who are more “at-risk” of higher harm and when its difficult to maintain behaviour change.
Theory of Individual-level behaviour change : Beliefs/ Theory
4 sets of individual beliefs that relate to health behaviours
‒ Attributions
whether you think a behaviour is inside or outside of your control
‒ Risk perception
how susceptible you think you are to harm from the behaviour
‒ Motivation
why you choose to perform the behaviour
‒ Self-efficacy
how capable you believe you are to perform the behaviour
Theory of Individual-level behaviour change: Theory
Current thinking brings together different models that have been proposed over the years into an integrated model.
- 83 theories and 1659 constructs combined
- Good for intervention design
- Can distil COM-B into theoretical domains
Why is Theory of Individual-level behaviour change useful?
Useful for qualitative research – provides a framework to map themes against
COM-B (Michie et al 2011)
Capability–> Physical skills
- Rehearsal or practice of behaviour
- Habit formation
Knowledge
- Health consequences
- Feedback on behaviour
