Correspondence: DR. Rick Botelho
B.Med.Sci, BM, BS, MRCGP (UK) Professor of Family Medicine, Rochester, NY
Email: Rick_Botelho@urmc.rochester.edu
Workshop July 24th 13.00 - 16:15 hours
Venue: College of Family Physicians Singapore, Seminar Room
Taxi Instruction to Venue:
College of Family Physicians Singapore, Seminar Room
Singapore General Hospital, Ministry of Health’s Building
College of Medicine Building
16 College Road #01-02 Singapore 169854
Transportation (for up to 40 people)
Pick Up: 12.30pm at Mandarin Mandarin Hotel
Return Trip: 4.20 pm at Driveway of Ministry of Health’s Building
Approximately time from Convention Centre to venue: 20-30 minutes, depending
on traffic.
For background information about the workshop, click here to read a book
introduction.
Improve Your Health Habits before Helping Others:
Go Beyond the Limits of Scientific Evidence to Personal Evidence
Regrettably, the vast majority of patients fail to change their risk behaviors in response to evidence-based guidelines. Despite knowing the risks and harms of their unhealthy habits, knowledge alone does not change behavior for most individuals. Changing behavior is a complex issue. Furthermore, the global epidemics of unhealthy habits are getting worse and far exceed the capacity of the health care systems. Mutual aid and self-help approaches are needed to help individuals (practitioners and patients alike) to improve their health behaviors.
What is necessary to change a person is to change their self-awareness.
Abraham H. Maslow (American Psychologist)
Improve Your Healthy Habits before Helping Others
So how often do you think that you should change your own unhealthy habits, but don’t really feel like it. To go beyond the limits of scientific evidence, you can become the researcher of your own behavior change and develop personal evidence about behavior change. To break your unhealthy habits, you need to explore the gap between your knowledge and ineffective action. To do this, you need to go beyond:
Surface change—increasing your knowledge, thinking about change, having good intentions and setting goals
Deep change—enhancing your awareness about how your thoughts, feelings, perceptions and values affect your resistance and motivation to change
This paradigm shift goes beyond the “outside-in”, episodic teaching approach based on using scientific evidence to an “inside-out”, longitudinal learning process based on developing personal evidence.
Workshop Goals: You will—
Use a mutual aid and self-help approach and learn how to improve your own health habits before helping your colleagues, staff and patients
Experience reflective learning exercises that can facilitate deep change
Share your learning experiences about developing personal evidence with colleagues
Change Your Practice before Helping Your Patients
This experience-based, learning process can help leaders address the complexity of motivating behavior change. The Gandhi quote, "Be the change that you want to see in the world" can serve as their guiding principle for facilitating synergy between individual and organizational change in their practice settings. Leaders can galvanize organizational change by improving their own health habits and engaging their practitioners and staff to do the same. This process can create a health-promoting, learning organization that enhances its ongoing capacity to work more effectively with patients, their families and communities over time.
