Scope of Practice

Health Coach Scope of Practice

1. Health Coaches work with individuals and groups to facilitate the client(s) to achieve their health and wellbeing goals.

2. Health Coaches support clients to make sustainable healthy lifestyle behaviour changes.

3. Health Coaches do not diagnose medical conditions, prescribe or de-prescribe medications. They are *trained to recognise when, how and who to refer to when situations arise that are outside their scope of practice.

4. **Health Coaches do provide expert guidance where they are competent, appropriately qualified and up-to-date.

5. This guidance is given as part of a co-created (with their client/patient) plan involving healthy lifestyle behaviour changes.

6. These plans are consistent with or developed in consultation with the client’s primary care physician or other allied health professionals who are on the client’s health team.

7. Health coaches work in the intersection between transformational coaching and current health and lifestyle medicine science. They provide education that fits with their clients’ health aspirations.

*Health Coaches work under the ethical principle of non-maleficence. **Competence is something that all health professionals need to constantly assess for themselves at all stages of their careers. Appropriately qualified means a nationally recognised qualification such as the PREKURE Health Coach Certificate (NZQA Micro credential Level 5 – Equivalent on the AQF). Up-to-date means they are continually learning and meeting the Health Coaches Australia New Zealand Association (HCANZA) and PREKURE requirements to undertake a minimum of 10 hours of CPD per year.

 

Health Coaches Do

  • Help clients make sense of diagnoses and understand care plans.

  • Provide general education about biomarkers.

  • Educate clients about supplements and enable them to become critical consumers.

  • Listen with compassion and acknowledge emotions and the experience of the client.

  • Empower clients to seek information, enhance their knowledge and support them to build a plan forward that works for them.

  • Refer clients to appropriately qualified health experts when necessary.

  • Support clients to make positive lifestyle changes.

  • Support clients to identify strategies they can use to overcome obstacles on their way to achieving their desired goals.

  • Encourage the client to take responsibility by providing accountability.

 

 Health Coaches Don't

  • Diagnose or treat clients.*

  • Prescribe medications.*

  • Order or interpret lab results.*

  • Recommend or sell nutritional or other herbal supplements.*

  • Provide psychotherapy.*

  • Give specific nutritional advice or write meal plans for clients.*

  • Design exercise plans.*

  • Force the client to take on the coach’s nutritional, exercise or other behavioural philosophies.

  • Coerce a client into doing something or try to control the steps they take when making changes. 

 

 Source: prekure.com

*This relates to those who solely hold a qualification in health coaching. If the health coach holds a relevant qualification under which they are able to (within scope) execute these activities, then they may. When doing so they will not be acting as a health coach but as the other allied health professional they are registered as.