Karcher Michael J, Zaff Jonathan F
Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education and Human Development, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA (MJK).
Department of Applied Psychology, Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA (JFZ).
Am J Lifestyle Med. 2025 May 7:15598276251339462. doi: 10.1177/15598276251339462.
Most health care professionals can help clients connect with others and expand their support networks, and this is within their professional role. For many professionals, we suggest that being able to size up the available sources of support in patients' lives is critical to their overall well-being and creating post-treatment conditions that achieve the greatest health outcomes. This may be especially true for adolescents who often turn to peers and adults outside the home for support. However, identifying potential health care allies in a patient's life can be daunting, and one for which there are few tools or guides. Here we describe several benefits to health care providers from assessing a patient's web of support and their connectedness. We present 2 assessment strategies that can be used by lifestyle medicine practitioners to both assess and expand their patients' webs of support and connectedness to others; these small efforts, we argue, can yield major health benefits, in part, by increasing patient compliance with physician directives.
大多数医疗保健专业人员可以帮助患者与他人建立联系并扩大他们的支持网络，这属于他们的专业职责范围。对于许多专业人员来说，我们认为能够评估患者生活中可用的支持来源对他们的整体幸福感以及创造能实现最佳健康结果的治疗后条件至关重要。对于经常向家庭以外的同龄人和成年人寻求支持的青少年来说，情况可能尤其如此。然而，在患者生活中识别潜在的医疗保健盟友可能令人生畏，而且针对这一点几乎没有什么工具或指南。在这里，我们描述了医疗保健提供者评估患者的支持网络及其联系程度能获得的一些益处。我们介绍了两种评估策略，生活方式医学从业者可以使用这些策略来评估并扩大患者的支持网络以及他们与他人的联系；我们认为，这些小小的努力可以带来重大的健康益处，部分原因是提高患者对医生指示的依从性。
