Page 44 - IDF Journal 2023

44
IDF – Webinar Series IDF News – Spring 2023
Coaching and Mentoring for Doctors and Patients
Dr Andrew Leahy
This is a brief introduction
to the area. It is not a ‘how to do it’ but simply meant to give you some idea of why
it matters and where further information is available. What I am not able to convey adequately in this article are the rewards that the coach/ mentor receive from the change in relationships with the coachee/mentee.
Most of the comments here apply to both coaching and mentoring.
Standard definition of coaching:
Unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.1
Standard definition of mentoring:
A learning relationship, involving the sharing of skills, knowledge, and expertise between a mentor and mentee through developmental conversations, experience sharing, and role modelling. The relationship may cover a wide variety of contexts and is an inclusive two-way partnership for mutual learning that values differences.2
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
Broadly (and oversimplifying) mentoring is a longer-term relationship and allows more flexibility to be directive than coaching does. A mentor may teach new skills.
Why do I need to know about this?
• The NHS has actively pursued coaching and mentoring for staff for some years, mainly via the academy system. It strongly advocates that coaching becomes an important way of working with patients as well as staff.3
• The NHS is introducing health and wellbeing coaches into Primary Care Networks (PCNs) via the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme.
• Health coaching has been identified as one of five key interventions by NHS England in their 2016 ‘Substantial Self-care Programme’ (NHS Health Coaching - Quality Framework).
• Patients will turn more to coaches of various descriptions privately as well as via the NHS.
• Mentoring and coaching have increasingly become tools used for career and personal development, as well as for support to staff.4
• Reverse mentoring is going to become extensively used to ensure that people are aware of issues, especially in the equality and diversity area, but also
to ensure that senior staff are aware of the perspectives of their junior colleagues.
There are debates about where the boundaries between coaching/mentoring and therapy lie. It is worth remembering the following quote by a very successful coach:
“After many years of trying and many conversations, I have failed to come up with a complete and watertight distinction between coaching and counselling. The
core skills involved in counselling and coaching, and indeed mentoring, are very similar if not actually the same. These are principally the skills of listening and asking questions. They are the skills towards
the non-directive end of the spectrum of coaching skills.”5
What is coaching?
Coaching is a tool which creates a collaborative/co-operative approach between coach and coachee because it is based on these principles:
• people are able to work out their own solutions
• they have inner resources that coaching will release for them
• based on co-operation/partnership
• enhances self-belief
• gives them tools they can use outside the relationship with coach/mentor
What are the benefits for patients?
We have long known that the current system of health care is not working well for chronic illnesses, multiple morbidity, and lifestyle issues, so we require new approaches.
We know that patients often do not follow or understand advice given, that the impact of what is said by the professional rapidly wears off, and that the amount of time any professional can spend with a patient is very limited, so their influence is also limited.
Research shows that people only remember, on average, three things from any one consultation - ‘hello, it’s a virus, goodbye.’6
A standard definition of health coaching is:
A patient-centred approach wherein patients at least partially determine
their goals, use self-discovery or active learning processes together with content education to work toward their goals, and self-monitor behaviours to increase accountability, all within the context of an interpersonal relationship with a coach7