Essay on Health and Behaviour Change

Psychological approaches for health and behaviour change

Much of the pain when you are sick is the bitter portion within oneself by which physicians inside you heal your sick self. There is no one who wishes sickness among themselves because this takes the most significant level of their comfort from them (Riekert et al., 2013). This is usually the primary reason why people go to the hospital to seek medication when they are sick. We experience very many cases of people who fail to do what the doctors instruct them to do in order to get better.

The first reason why people might fail to take the doctor’s instructions carefully is when they do not have the knowledge of the extent this illness can become. The patient might not be aware of the seriousness of this particular illness to their lives (Hagger et al., 2020). Psychological studies have proven that the pre-existing behaviour that the person is used to might have been more comfortable compared to what they are being instructed to do. This makes it hard to change because they want to remain in their comfort zones. This clearly indicates that the patient has a less flexible mind.

Personalized psychological approach

Non-adherence to medical prescription is known to be the leading cause of recurrence or relapse of psychotic illnesses. In efforts to ensure patients’ compliance to prescribed treatments, I am thinking of inventing a personalized psychological approach to offer this kind of support to patients in my future profession. Literature shows that compliance therapy and a brief cognitive approach and interview can lead to the improvement in adherence to the treatments given to patients (Little et al., 2016). The patient is supposed to be aware of both the negative and positive effects of taking or not taking the medication. I have done my experiments in a hospital, where I conducted compliance therapy for a small group of patients. The results were very encouraging because the shortened version and the adherence rate before and after therapy had dramatically changed.

Physiological interventions to enhance treatment compliance

Psychologically, I would use different approaches based on patients’ psychological perspectives towards the treatments to help the patients adhere to their treatments. The following are some of the interventions I would utilize to support the patient:

• Assess the health literacy of the patient– this is to know the degree to which the patient is able to process, obtain and understand the basic health information services. This is one of the social determinants of health that significantly affects a patient’s compliance (Hagger et al., 2020). After this assessment, you are then supposed to make the patient understand why they need to take this medication and the benefits that might come along with taking the medication.
• Talk about the side effects of not taking medicine– patients who have already encountered the side effects that come along with not finishing a dose of medicine are less likely to stop taking a medication. This is because they have experienced the negativity in this(Little et al., 2016). This is therefore supposed to be made known to any patient.
• Understand patient’s medication-taking behaviours- As a good psychologist, you are supposed first to understand whether the patient is having trouble taking medicine. This can be either through allergic reactions or affordability. This is to ensure that no barriers are existing for a patient to adhere to doctors prescriptions.

References

Hagger, M. S., Cameron, L. D., Hamilton, K., Hankonen, N., & Lintunen, T. (2020). The handbook of behaviour change. Cambridge University Press.

Little, L., Sillence, E., & Joinson, A. (2016). Behaviour change research and theory: Psychological and technological perspectives. Academic Press.

Riekert, K. A., Ockene, J. K., & Pbert, L. (2013). The handbook of health behaviour change (4th ed.). Springer Publishing Company.