How people think

Healthy CHAT / Section One: Introduction

What do people think?

Traditionally, people have received health messages from Medical Practitioners. However, clients are generally accepting of brief health messages from other healthcare workers, especially when related to their reason for attendance at the health service. REF
Timing is important

People accessing health services told us:

“If the advice is tailored to the individual and explicit reasons given, maybe that will work — it will strike a chord.”

“I think acknowledging, finding out what activity is working for you, what I enjoy doing that I could do a little bit more of, I’d be far more likely to do it.”

“You need to keep it simple.”

“If you respect someone and they think enough of you to talk to you about it, well it makes you listen, but they have to listen to you.”

“If you respect someone and they think enough of you to talk to you about it, well it makes you listen.”

“If clinicians give you advice in the right tone, you listen to them.”

However, it is important to remember that having a Healthy CHAT is opportunistic and may not be directly related to the reason the person is seeing you. The second part of this module explains how you can identify opportunistic moments and use door openers to start a Healthy CHAT.

What do healthcare workers think?

“With clients, I’ve had just that one-off talk, working out what the issue is, working around not telling them what is wrong, but where they feel changes need to be made and saying, there’s this service or that service available to help them.”

“Those small conversations need to happen quite regularly.”

“What we found is the consistency message from different clinicians, is what starts the change for clients.”

“As long as you ask the right questions in that initial assessment and then not so much tell, but work with and find help, then find the solutions as to what they need to be working on.”

Potential challenges highlighted by healthcare workers include:

  • Lacking confidence to ask about a person’s behavioural risk factors
  • Not seeing this as part of their role
  • Inadequate training
  • Not enough time to give advice during their consultation or routine nursing care
  • Feeling that they may not be a positive role model
  • Fear of antagonising people
  • Lack of awareness about referral pathways/screening tools
The next section will help you address the challenges and learn how to use Healthy CHAT.