Health and Wellness Coaching: Providers and Practice—A Commentary on Sforzo and Colleagues (2018)

Abstract

The field of health and wellness coaching holds great promise for making health behavior change interventions available to more individuals. We assert that the health and wellness literature should recognize the potential of lay persons to provide health coaching and lay person health coach studies should be included in the compendium compiled by Sforzo and colleagues. Limiting the field to current health professionals decreases the number of potential coaches unnecessarily. The compendium will be an excellent resource for researchers to compile the existing data to determine the effectiveness of coaching, what aspects of coaching are effective, for what conditions coaching is effective, and what outcomes coaching improves. We provide commentary that researchers exploring health coaching should recognize the importance of physical activity in improving outcomes for a number of different populations and should health behaviors as outcomes in health coaching intervention studies.

Compendium of Health and Wellness Coaching: 2019 Addendum

“…Moreover, a recently published commentary opined strongly for dropping "health care professional" from our list of HWC article inclusion criteria. 37 A good case made by these authors came too late for consideration in this Addendum, though we will deliberate on coaching qualifications criteria for future addendums to the Compendium. We also remind readers that a publication bias likely exists in the HWC literature, leading to more positive than negative findings being published and reviewed.…”