What is a Wellbeing Coach?
A wellbeing coach is a trained professional who helps individuals navigate various aspects of their lives to improve their overall wellbeing.
This can include making specific decisions, enhancing mental or physical health, adopting healthier lifestyles, and boosting overall happiness and confidence.
Unlike traditional coaches who may focus on specific goals, wellbeing coaches take a holistic approach, addressing multiple areas of a person's life to foster comprehensive wellbeing.
Health and Wellbeing Coaches – Why are they important?
Health and wellbeing coaches are important for multiple reasons. Ultimately they play a crucial role in today’s healthcare landscape.
By providing personalised support, they help individuals make sustainable lifestyle changes to improve their health and wellbeing. Here they help set realistic goals and motivate positive behaviour changes to provide ongoing support and accountability. This in turn helps to reduce healthcare costs, and GP attendance and improve overall quality of life.
Below are some more examples of why wellbeing coaching is important in your community:
- Enhances self-awareness
- Increases resilience
- Provides better stress-management
- Increases confidence
- Improves accessibility to resources
- Reduces risk of chronic diseases
- Offers better management of long-term conditions
- Provide better guidance through life transitions
What do wellbeing coaches do?
The roles and responsibilities of wellbeing coaches are vital to help them improve various aspects of an individual’s health and overall quality of life.
They conduct initial assessments to understand an individual's current health status to co-produce a plan that identifies areas of improvement and what they would like to achieve.
Their role typically includes the following 10 stages with every individual they support:
- Goal Setting – Wellbeing coaches help individuals identify and set specific, achievable goals related to health, wellness and personal growth.
- Personalised Support Plans – Wellbeing coaches create customised action plans with the individual tailored to their needs, preferences, and lifestyle to help them achieve their goals.
- Behaviour Change Support – They provide guidance and strategies to help clients make and sustain positive changes in their habits, such as diet, exercise, or stress management.
- Motivation and Accountability – Through offering encouragement, wellbeing coaches hold individuals accountable for their progress, helping them stay motivated and committed to their goals.
- Educate and Inform – Another key responsibility for health and wellbeing coaches is to educate individuals on various health and wellness topics as well as how different social determinants of health can impact their health and wellbeing e.g. housing or employment.
- Skill Building – Wellbeing coaches also teach practical skills such as time management, stress reduction techniques, and effective communication.
- Emotional Support – Ultimately one of their biggest responsibilities is to offer a supportive and empathetic ear, helping individuals navigate challenges and maintain a positive mindset.
- Monitor Progress – To make sure individuals achieve their goals, Wellbeing Coaches have to monitor their progress. This is done through regular check-ins, assessing their progress, and making adjustments to plans as needed as well as celebrating their successes.
- Behavioural Insights – Through monitoring progress, health and wellbeing coaches help individuals gain insights into their behaviours, triggers, and patterns to better understand and address underlying issues.
- Transitional Support – One of the final responsibilities wellbeing coaches have is supporting individuals through significant life transitions, such as career changes, health challenges, or personal shifts, to maintain or improve their wellbeing.
Mental Health and Wellbeing Coaches – What are the differences?
Mental health and wellbeing coaches may specialise in various areas. For example, some may specialise in emotional wellbeing, financial wellbeing, mental health, or physical health.
Also as wellbeing coaches have gained in popularity they have now been introduced into different areas especially as mental health issues have been increasing rapidly over the last couple of years.
For example, school wellbeing coaches and children’s wellbeing coaches have been introduced in some areas to enable a designated role to tackle and address children's mental health issues.
Equally staff wellbeing coaches have also been introduced across different types of employment for similar reasons. However, this role tends to be in addition to an existing role.
ICS health and wellbeing coaches are an example of a role that’s been introduced like a link worker to be a part of a multi-disciplinary team across the ICS to better support community mental health and wellbeing needs across a local authority.
By having wellbeing coaches or something similar across a wide range of industries, we can address mental health issues more effectively across the UK as mental health demands increase, however, there are still some challenges with this.
How to become a health and wellbeing coach?
As health and wellbeing coaches are being created in a variety of sectors there are many ways to become one. However, The Workforce development framework for health and wellbeing coaches guides health coaches in the NHS and those employing them to set out professional standards and competencies, as well as the training and continuous professional development needed.
Here the health and wellbeing coaching guide is designed to support the delivery of wellbeing coaching, setting out the key features and principles of an effective system-wide approach to improve wellbeing.
Ideal for those working within an integrated care system (ICS) to support the planning and delivery of health and wellbeing coaching, by following this guidance and ensuring your approach aligns with the Comprehensive Model for Personalised Care, you can ensure that you fully understand what should and shouldn’t be considered as health and wellbeing coaching.
Never replacing clinical support, wellbeing coaching, like social prescribing offers a holistic approach to address the mental health and wellbeing needs of the community.
Challenges faced by wellbeing coaches
Like any new role within a sector there can be challenges, and implementing wellbeing coaching within ICSs, voluntary organisations, and primary care, to name a few, is no different.
Below are just some examples of challenges wellbeing coaches can face:
1.Limited engagement
One of the primary challenges wellbeing coaches face is engagement. Ensuring that individuals are motivated and committed to making changes can be difficult, especially when dealing with deeply ingrained habits and behaviours.
Coaches need to employ a variety of strategies to maintain motivation and engagement over the long term.
2. Resource Limitations
Access to resources can also be a significant challenge. Wellbeing coaches often require access to various tools and support systems to effectively assist individuals. Limited resources can hinder their ability to provide comprehensive care and support.
3. Burnout
Wellbeing coaches, like many healthcare professionals, are at risk of burnout. The emotional toll of supporting individuals through significant life changes, combined with high caseloads and administrative burdens, can lead to stress and burnout.
Wellbeing coaches need to have access to professional development opportunities, supervision, and peer support to maintain their wellbeing too.
Wellbeing coaches and social prescribing – what is the link?
Wellbeing coaches and social prescribing are closely linked in the broader context of holistic health and community-based care.
Both social prescribing link workers and wellbeing coaches work with individuals to achieve their goals to improve their mental health and wellbeing. Social Prescribing Link Workers then co-produce a social prescription that matters to the individual, whereas wellbeing coaches provide ongoing support and motivation helping individuals to engage with activities and services recommended through social prescribing.
Both also play a key role in encouraging sustained engagement by monitoring progress and adjusting plans or social prescriptions when needed to ensure they are motivated and stay engaged to reach their goals to notice improvements in their health and wellbeing.
Social prescribing is an approach that directly addresses the social determinants of health by connecting individuals to resources that tackle issues like loneliness, physical inactivity and poor mental health, whereas coaches can provide personalised strategies to address these social determinates offering tailored advice on how to incorporate social prescribing recommendations into daily life.
Ultimately wellbeing coaches and social prescribing work hand-in-hand to provide a comprehensive approach to health and wellbeing. While social prescribing connects individuals to beneficial community resources, wellbeing coaches ensure that these connections translate into meaningful and lasting changes in an individual’s life.
Addressing Wellbeing Coaches’ Challenges: How digital social prescribing software can make a difference?
Digital social prescribing software plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges that wellbeing coaches face, particularly in streamlining administrative burdens, managing workloads, and tracking progress effectively.
Wellbeing coaches often have to juggle lots of cases with the time-consuming tasks of managing records, scheduling, and coordinating care with other health services.
Digital platforms alleviate this burden by automating routine tasks, such as referrals and data entry, allowing coaches to focus more on spending time supporting the individual. This efficiency not only reduces administrative strain but also ensures that coaches can manage their workloads more effectively, dedicating more time to providing personalised care.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing tracking individual mental health journeys couldn’t be any easier. Here our platform enables coaches to monitor outcomes in real time making it easier to adjust plans and provide more timely interventions when needed.
The ability to track progress consistently ensures that individuals stay on course with their health and wellbeing goals, allowing coaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of their interventions through detailed reports. This continuous monitoring is essential for maintaining motivation and ensuring accountability to other healthcare stakeholders. This, in turn, helps to secure more funding in the future to avoid the issues of resource and budget constraints.
By investing in our digital social prescribing software you can also enhance the accessibility and reach of wellbeing coaches. Our integrations with leading clinical systems make it even easier to manage referrals effectively as well as allow for consistent support without the need for constant in-person visits, ensuring more individuals can benefit from the services wellbeing coaches provide. As a result, this integrated model supports the delivery of comprehensive care, addressing all aspects of an individual’s health and wellbeing.
Action Together for example, has had over 1,800 referrals in the last year alone all managed through our social prescribing software in one centralised place. Here we have been able to track the progress of every referral and monitor mental health journeys to identify that 94% of individuals have noticed an improvement in their health and wellbeing following the service, as well as a 65% reduction in GP attendance, not just saving time for link workers but all primary care professionals.
Here by leveraging our digital tools, the same outcomes, time savings and cost savings can be achieved for wellbeing coaches by overcoming many of the challenges they face, improving their efficiency and effectiveness in supporting individuals.
This not only enhances the quality of care but also ensures that wellbeing coaches can reach and support a broader range of populations, ultimately contributing to better health outcomes across communities.
Summarising the importance of wellbeing coaches
This article has explored the critical role that wellbeing coaches play in improving community health by offering personalised support that addresses the broader social determinants of health.
By explaining how wellbeing coaches help bridge the gap between knowledge and action, this article has explained how wellbeing coaches empower individuals to make sustainable lifestyle changes that lead to better health outcomes and enhanced quality of life. However, these professionals face challenges such as managing high caseloads, administrative burdens, and the need for consistent engagement and progress tracking.
Investing in Access Elemental Social Prescribing software can help address these challenges by streamlining administrative tasks, enabling real-time progress tracking, and enhancing the reach and accessibility of wellbeing services.
Our platform automates routine processes, freeing up coaches to focus on what they do best—supporting individuals on their wellness journeys. The ability to track and demonstrate the effectiveness of interventions not only improves client outcomes but also helps secure necessary resources and funding.
By leveraging our digital tools, wellbeing coaches can enhance their efficiency and effectiveness, ultimately contributing to better health outcomes across communities.
To see how Access Elemental can transform your wellbeing coaching services, contact us today and let’s get started revolutionising your wellbeing coaching services.
