Blog Reflection for LG Health Coaching Session

My health coaching patient is a very enthusiastic woman. Our first session was a success. One challenge presented to me was the inability to provide recommendations from a medical standpoint. This woman was just diagnosed with hypertension and the resident had advised her to stop drinking soda. So instead of drinking soda, she wanted to start drinking gatorade. Being aware of the high sodium content of gatorade I found myself being caught between an opportunity I could prevent her from worsening her disease and not providing medical advice. Luckily the resident popped in and overheard our conversation and advised she didn’t drink gatorade. So instead her goal was to replace soda/gatorade with tea.
One success we experience together was her willingness to keep her goal. She felt very confident in herself and rated her ability to keep her goal 9.5/10. She said there was’t really anything she couldn’t put her mind to. I like her spirit.

A success of a peer was finding a patient that she really connected to. This peer had originally had a very difficult time when it came to finding a patient, but now then found a phenomenal one.

One struggle she had was when the patient couldn’t find time to meet with her before Oct 10th. I can see this is particularly frustrating for this student, especially since she had no input in the patient’s schedule. This was compounded by the fact that when she emailed trying to ask what could be done from an administrative standpoint, she was informed it would be considered a breach of professionalism as a student if she failed to comply with the deadline. I saw this as a particularly difficult challenge.

As a solution, I would suggest perhaps asking if a Skype or phone call session would be appropriate for approval so that both the time of the patient can be taken into account and the student will not be punished for things she cannot control. I have found that finding a middle solution when things are beyond our control often shows the people you are working with that you are actually trying. Perhaps even a face to face correspondence would be best. I myself had a similar experience where I was merely asking how to label LP visits in the system and was treated via email as though I was a belligerent student because I think the receiver misread my email. They seemed to think I had not attended all of the LP visits when in reality the other student and I switched our dates because she had been sick the week she was supposed to go.

Or perhaps, considering this seems to be a pattern among students, conducting a Root Cause Analysis to evaluate factors that are causing students to error as a result of systematic problems instead of individual compliance issues. But maybe the point of it is to get us to get used to the system. I don’t know.

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