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ABSTRACT
Self-management behaviours, If constructively used, can assist people with long-term conditions to manage their health and well-being more effectively. The role of clinicians is to provide support for patient self-management because we know that incorporating constructive behaviours into daily life can be challenging for patients. The aim of this paper is to provide an opportunity for clinicians to understand how the content and delivery of interventions could support patient self-management. In this paper, we therefore highlight a number of theoretical frameworks that may assist clinicians to explicitly identify components of their interactions with patients. As an illustrative example, we use a self-management programme for fatigue, developed with people with multiple sclerosis (MS) in New Zealand. We believe that with a better understanding of behaviour change processes, clinicians have an opportunity to see the full range of behaviour change techniques (BCTs) available to them and how these could be used, to think more carefully about the BCTs they embed in their practice and, therefore, to critically reflect on how they could better support patient self-management.
Wilkinson, A., Mulligan, H., Snowdon, J., & Pfeifer, K. (2020). Bridging theory and practice for supporting patient self-management. New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, 48(2), 92-97. https://doi.org/10.15619/NZJP/48.2.05
Key Words: Behaviour Change, Long-Term Conditions, Self-Management Support
INTRODUCTION
As clinicians we often notice patterns of behaviours in ourselves that are potentially detrimental to our own health. We also know, however, that self-management behaviours, if constructively used, can assist us to manage our health and well-being effectively. This is also true for people with long-term conditions. Yet we know only too well that incorporating constructive behaviours for self-management into daily life is challenging (Harvey et al., 2015; Jerant et al., 2005; Kralik et al., 2004; Wilkinson et al., 2014). Our role as clinicians is to provide support to patients toward self-management. Thus, an important aim for clinicians is to understand how to best support patients to develop and include self-management behaviours into their daily lives. In a guest editorial of the New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy, Mulligan (2019) argued that efficacy of physiotherapy interventions could be improved through incorporating patients' preferences and contexts into physiotherapy interventions.
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