Abstract
Objective: Doctors and members of a co-medical team (nurses, public health nurses, national registered dieticians, pharmacists, physical therapists) have been making use of their individual coaching skills in giving guidance to patients matched to individual behaviour modification stages under a lifestyle disease improvement program conducted jointly in consultation with each other. In the last 3 years, behavioural modification was observed in all patients who completed this educational program and there was an improvement in laboratory data for 84% of them. This improvement rate was as good or better than that achieved in previous studies and we verified the achievement of such a high level of improvement.
Methods: We entered data for 100 patients (diabetes 86, hyperlipidemia 8, hypertension 6) who had completed a 3-month program during the period January 2007 - December 2009 on whether there had been changes in behavioural modification stage, changes in dietary and exercise habits or other behavioural changes between before and after undergoing the program into a database and analyzed it. We also analyzed changes in laboratory data.
Results: There was an improvement in the behavioural modification stage for all subjects, from "considering modification" to "making preparations for modification" or "actually modifying behaviour". The rates of improvement for dietary habits, exercise habits, other behavioural modification and laboratory data were 99%, 95%, 96% and 84%, respectively.
Conclusions: We consider that specialist counseling and expert coaching matched to individual behavioural modification stages in a lifestyle disease improvement program conducted by doctors and a comedical team in close consultation with each other was effective in achieving improvements in patients’ lifestyle habits and laboratory data. We felt that the methods used would also be useful in specific health guidance.
