The role will require managing and prioritising a caseload, in accordance with the needs, priorities and any urgent support required by individuals in the caseload. NHS England advise for Health and Wellbeing Coaches to work closely in partnership with Social Prescribing Link Workers or social prescribing services to identify and work alongside people who may need additional support.
To provide one-to-one health coaching support for people with one or more long term conditions, based on what is important to them, with the aim of:
- Improving people’s levels of ‘patient activation’.
- Empowering people to improve their health outcomes and sense of wellbeing.
- Preventing unnecessary reliance on clinical service.
- Providing interventions such as self-management education and peer support.
- Supporting people to establish and attain goals set by the person based on what is important to them, building on goals that are important to the individual.
- Working with the social prescribing service to support the triaging of referrals that connect people to the right intervention/ community-based activities which support their health and wellbeing.
- To work as part of a multidisciplinary multi agency team to promote Health Coaching and to be ambassadors for Personalised Care and Supported Self-Management, modelling the coaching approach in their work.
- To support local health, social care and voluntary sector professionals to make appropriate referrals to the service.
- To promote and raise awareness of the health coaching service particularly to groups and communities that experience barriers to access.
- To attend and contribute to team meetings and events as required by the service.
- To support the system, they work within to develop pathways that are relevant to the needs of people who receive health coaching.
- Provide support to local community groups and work with other health, social care and voluntary sector providers to support the patients’ health and well-being holistically.
- Ensure that all PCN staff are made aware of health coaching and social prescribing services and support colleagues to improve their skills and understanding of personalised care, behavioural approaches, and ensuring consistency in the follow up of people’s goals where an MDT is involved.
- Raise awareness within the PCN of shared decision making-making conversations.
- Work with people with lower activation to understand their level of knowledge, skills and confidence (their “Activation” level) when engaging with their health and wellbeing.
- Explore and support access to a personal health budget, where appropriate, for their care and support.
- Utilise existing IT and MDT channels to screen patients, with an aim to identify those that would benefit from health coaching.
- To work flexibly, adapting to the needs of the service and client group while maintaining the integrity of the role.
- To collate service user experience and impact of health coaching as part of the delivery of personalised care.
- To participate and collect data that measures the impact of health coaching as an intervention that supports embedding personalised care into local health systems e.g. collect data entry relating to the health coaching activity in GP, LA and hospital clinical systems or other systems, as required.
*The Patient Activation Measure helps to measure the spectrum of knowledge, skills and confidence in patients and captures the extent to which people feel engaged and confident in taking care of their condition.
- Active and empathic listening
- Effective questioning
- Building trust and rapport
- Providing supportive challenge
- Shared agenda setting
- Collaborative goal setting
- Shared follow up planning
- Using simple health literate communication techniques
- Structuring conversations using a coaching approach
- Understanding and applying the health coaching approach and mindset
- Knowledge and recognition of the core concepts and principles of personalised care, shared decision making, patient activation, health behaviour change, self-efficacy, motivation and assets-based approaches
- Developed skills to further develop their health coaching through on-going practice, reflection and planning as reflective practitioners
- Able to work within a biopsychosocial model, using a range of tools and techniques to enable and support people, such as agenda setting, goal setting, problem solving
- Creating and maintaining a safe and positive relationship
- Setting and maintaining appropriate boundaries
- Structuring programmatic and sessional goals
- Managing and making effective use of time
- Managing resistance to change and ambivalence
- Being responsive and sensitive to the needs and beliefs of the client
- Appropriate use of problem solving, and goal follow up across sessions to maintain and increase activation
Employers should support Health and Wellbeing Coaches in their continuous professional development (CPD). Giving them dedicated time, and where necessary funding, for training and CPD. Regular supervision sessions, appraisals and personal development planning should all be used as opportunities to focus on specific needs to progress and/or meet the competencies for the role.
Personalised Care Institute
Personalised Care Institute provide e-learning for health and care professionals, set the standards for evidence-based personalised care training, providing a robust quality-assurance and accreditation framework for training providers and commissioners along with a central learning hub for health and care professional learners.
The Primary Care Training Hub (North East North Cumbria) also have a dedicated personalised care roles webpage.
North Cumbria CCG and Yorkshire and Humber NHS England Regional Social Prescribing Team have compiled The Personalised Care Roles Training Matrix & Personal Development document which outlines the training available, organised by area of competency.
Register with the personalised care institute e-learning modules suitable as part of the induction process:
• Core skills in personalised care
• Personalised care and support planning
• Supporting behaviour change
• Health literacy skills
Future NHS
To access to the Future NHS Personalised Care Collaborative platform Please register using your NHS email address then using the My Workspaces function, request to join the Future NHS On-line Collaborative platform - Personalised Care Collaborative network. This is where NHS England & Improvement share all the latest information and resources on personalised care.
e-Learning for Healthcare
The following resources can be accessed via e-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH). E-LfH provides free e-learning programmes which can support you in your professional development.
If you do not already have an account, click here to register using your NHS email address. If you already have an account, please use the same link to firstly log in to access the following resources.
The below resources have been created to support practicing or aspiring health and wellbeing coaches:
- Care Certificate: This programme offers learning materials to support the development of knowledge, skills and behaviours required to achieve all 15 Standards of the Care Certificate.
- Five Ways to Wellbeing: This session introduces the concept of wellbeing and describes how the Five Ways to Wellbeing can be implemented in a variety of settings to promote it.
- Signposting: you will learn how information sharing and signposting is an integral part of Making Every Contact Count (MECC). You will also find out how to provide accurate, current, and relevant materials in sufficient supply to your client and signpost to other health improvement services.
- Health Inequalities: The resources found in the portal can help the workforce to learn about health inequalities, the effect on these on the quality and length of life of our populations and how the systems and communities can work together to tackle these.
- Population Health Management: An introduction to population health management and the key data and analytical approaches that will improve the understanding of population health in local systems.
- Shared Decision Making The Shared Decision Making e-learning resource provides guidance on what Shared Decision Making (SDM) is and how to implement it in practice. It provides resources to help health professionals learn the required skills, such as films to illustrate examples of good and bad consultations and prompts, along with resources to help implement shared decision making in practice. This contains a module on helping patients make informed decisions in Primary Care.
- Health Budgets: This session will describe the key features of a personal health budget. It presents an overview of personal health budgets as well as providing links to stories from clinicians and patients about how a personal health budget has worked for them
- Person Centred Approaches: The aim of the course is to enable staff to behave in a person-centred way, based on the person-centred approaches framework, which aims to distil best practice and to set out core, transferable behaviours, knowledge and skills
- Supporting people with their mental health through social prescribing
The below resources have been categorised by different elements of individual health:
Weight and Physical Health:
Mental Health:
Drug and Alcohol:
These lists are not exhaustive and the programmes available are regularly updated, so we recommend visiting the e-LfH portal and reviewing the available resources via using the “View full catalogue” function, or the “Search the e-learning" function.
Other Platforms
- Skills Platform provide high quality e-learning for clinical and care specialties, training framework and tools for workforce development.
- Year of Care delivers a package of training; facilitation and support to practices and areas interested in implementing care and support planning (CSP) for people with long term conditions.
- Maudsley Learning are running a free, national half-day online course as part of the strategy to improve physical health care outcomes in individuals with severe mental illness.
Supervision and Training
A PCN's Core Network Practices must identify a first point of contact for general advice and support and (if different) a GP to provide supervision. This could be provided by one or more of the following within the PCN:
- Experienced Health and Wellbeing Coach
- Experienced Social Prescribing Link Worker
- GP
- Physician Associate
- ACP
They must also have access to regular supervision from a health coaching mentor. In addition to this, formal and individual group coaching supervision must come from a suitably qualified or experienced health coaching supervisor.
The Personalised Care Institute (PCI) launched September 2020 convened by the Royal College of General Practitioners has the primary role of setting the core curriculum and training standards for all healthcare staff in personalised care, based on the Universal Personalised Care Model.
The PCN should make sure that coaches have a named clinician in each practice they work in (and alternates in case of absence) with whom they can discuss patient related concerns and be supported to follow appropriate safeguarding procedures.
Alongside social prescribing link workers, care coordinators and other roles, coaches should be treated as part of the multidisciplinary team within the practice in which they work.
Please see below Supervision guidance as supported by the PCI, and provided by NHSEI.
Educated to GCSE or equivalent level.
Holding, or working towards, an NVQ level 3 or other relevant first level professional qualification may be advantageous.
Currently enrolled in, undertaking or qualified from Personalised Care Institute - Accredited Health Coaching Training to obtain a level three occupational standard.
Health and Wellbeing Coaches require the the necessary skills and training before taking referrals. They should complete the following PCI accredited courses:
100% of actual salary plus defined on-costs, up to the maximum reimbursable amount of £42,437 over 12 months. A PCN can also claim reimbursement for the time Health and Wellbeing Coaches spend out of practice undertaking some activities.
Role Overview
A document providing an overview of what the role is, as well as facilitating understanding of what the role is not.
This infographic demonstrates the importance of personalised care and the link of this role to the relevant services.
This updated DES 2024/25 outlines the role of the Health and Wellbeing Coach and what is expected from PCNs (page 83-86).
Employer Resources
This framework has been developed to provide guidance for Health and Wellbeing Coaches to increase understanding of where they can have most impact in supporting and empowering people to improve their health and wellbeing.
These are the slides from a presentation given covering Personalised Care roles in Primary Care Network giving an overview of the roles, skills and competencies, training, supervision and support.
The Primary Care Training Hub have collated resources to support The Primary Care Workforce and beyond with various elements of health and wellbeing. The below resources are free to the public or free to NHS staff, and offers a wide range of guidance and support.
Tools for Practice
This guide covers two distinct approaches to using health coaching: health coaching services and health coaching skills. This should be used alongside the self-management guide for health coaching.
This provides guidance on the suitability of referrals for Health and Wellbeing coaches.
This document is designed to support the delivery of a health and wellbeing coach and provide an introduction in the role. The document will also point the reader in the direction of more detailed information that will be useful to their role.
The Behaviour Change Development Framework and Toolkit can help you decide what sort of behaviour change training and planning is needed to effectively support people to make positive changes in their lives. The framework consists of an assessment to discover what level of behaviour change training you should be trained at, e-learning to help reach Behaviour Change Literacy (BCL) level, toolkits to access a range of tools and resources to help you develop and change behaviours and competency to discover learning and competencies that are required for each level of the Behaviour Change Development Framework.
Professional Bodies
The personalised care institute sets the standards for evidence-based personalised care training, providing a robust quality assurance and accreditation framework for training providers and commissioners, with a central learning hub for health and care professional learners.
Jobs
If you are looking for a new position related to this role, we recommend checking both NHS Jobs and HealthjobsUK.
NHS Jobs is the official online recruitment service for the NHS in England and Wales, with over 30,000 jobs posted every month.
Hosted by trac.jobs, HealthJobsUK is among the leading job boards in the health and public sector within the UK.
