Clinical Health Coach® Profile
Dixie Daugherty
| Julie: | Thanks for taking the time to talk with me Dixie. I want to start out by asking you what your role is in your hospital. |
| Dixie: | I am hospital based and we have rural clinics that are part of us. For the past 3 years, half of my job has been doing transitional care for patients who were in-patients at the University of Iowa, but live in Van Buren County. That included home visits and weekly phone calls and helping them identify resources to ensure that they didn’t get readmitted. It also included health coaching, which we started out doing one way and then after attending The Clinical Health Coach Training Program, my partner and I have totally changed what we are doing. |
| Julie: | How so? |
| Dixie: | We definitely have totally changed what we do on our home visits and our follow ups. We don’t go with our bags loaded with resources and tell our patients how and what to do to achieve optimum health. We let the patient tell us where they are at, where they want to be and how they are going to get there. It has made a huge difference. Our patients are much more successful in managing their own outcomes. They definitely have ownership for their plan and they are making changes that, I’m not sure would have happened if we had told them to exercise and made their plan for them. I don’t even give them calendars anymore (laughs). It has been very interesting to see what we perceived as their needs verses what was important to them and where they wanted to go. |
| Julie: | Can you think of any success stories that you have had? |
| Dixie: | We have patients that I would have not anticipated being successful in changing health habits. I can think of one in particular. It just snowballed after they started walking. They probably never had had a plan before or a routine and now it’s like religion. Every day at a certain time they were out walking and they pulled in some of their friends. In the beginning, nutrition wasn’t an option. The patient wasn’t going to change how he ate! But, after 3 months they were already making nutrition changes on their own. It seems that the patient was able to build on their little successes. Walking 10 minutes is a big deal if you’ve never had a walking program. It’s really exciting. |
| Julie: | How is your facility helping to integrate health coaching? |
| Dixie: | For the last 3 years we have been working with the university. We are going to continue the program even though it ends in July. Our docs, actually for the last few months now call us and ask us to take the patients on. We work with these patients when they come over for their primary care visit. They have us over there talking with the patients beforehand, working on a plan. Our docs are actually the reason we are continuing the program. They have talked administration in to continuing to pay our salaries because they have seen us helping the patients figure out a plan and learn to be successful. |
| Julie: | What advice would you have for someone who is just completing training? What advice would you like to share for using these new skills and putting them into motion? |
| Dixie: | Well, 2 things. First, it’s hard to completely change what you have done for the last 30+ years. Learn to listen. My colleague and I practiced a lot. It’s ok to struggle for a while. You will still see patients succeed even though you may have stumbled here and there. You get better every time you practice and you see the patients’ successes. Second, you need to make sure you are measuring your outcomes. |
| Julie: | Ok and how to you do that? |
| Dixie: | We do it in a variety of ways. We have a program that we enter the data on. Whether patients are keeping their appointments and are they exercising, etc. If they quit exercising and quit all the lifestyle changes they were making, chances are they are not going to be going to their doctors’ appointments either. We have seen really good success. |
| Julie: | How did you hear about Clinical Health Coach training? |
| Dixie: | My colleague had attended the training and when she was done, she started telling me how she was using these new skills. A lot of these skills we have had and we know those things, but this class really helped to pull it all together for us and give us the structure to truly change practice. We had taken MI and several other classes and we thought we were using all our skills, but this class really pulled it all together to be patient focused. We had a patient who was ready to die. The things that were important to do and that this patient was willing to do were not exercise and nutrition. They had other important things and we were able to help guide this patient. |
| Julie: | You mentioned earlier that listening was a challenge for you. Can you think of any challenges you had? |
| Dixie: | We were very lucky because we had administrative support from day one. We also have the time with patients. We spend 15 minutes to 1 hour in patients’ homes. |
| Julie: | Sounds like you are headed in the right direction. |
| Dixie: | It’s a very exciting time to be in healthcare. We tell anyone who works with patients with chronic diseases to take the class! It’s impacting our patients in a way we haven’t seen before. |