Coaching for Person-Centered Healthcare: A Solution-Focused Approach to Collaborative Care

This guide introduces a humanistic, solution-focused coaching model, using lived experience to demonstrate how profound changes in our healthcare experiences and system, for patients and staff, are possible; while also supporting readers to develop their own coaching skills.

Combining research, theory, and practice shared through personal experience, readers are introduced to solution-focused, dialogic tools for use in promoting person-centred care. The first section of the book introduces the coaching model and explores its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings, drawing on theories from neuroscience, neurobiology, communication sciences, humanistic psychology, and positive psychology. The second section of the book transitions from theory and research into clinical practice, making evident the broad range of healthcare contexts and domains in which the humanistic, solution-focused approaches are implemented, as well as the profound personal and professional implications associated with their use. The third section of the book focuses on the lived experience of four people, focusing on their interactions with healthcare before and after their coaching training, emphasizing the difference a humanistic, solution-focused approach has made for them and their families.

The final section then turns to organizational change and explores how solution-focused coaching provides insights, perspectives, and aspirations for system change. This engaging text is ideal reading for healthcare professionals, teachers, and leaders looking to develop and improve the care they deliver, the experiences of the people they are working with, and the organizations they deliver it within.

Dr Elaine Cook is the Manager Humanistic Education & Training at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. Her research focus is the neuroscience of optimal functioning and language.

Dr Gilbert J. Greene is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University in the College of Social Work.

Joanne Maxwell, PhD (candidate), is Vice President, Experience, Transformation and Social Accountability at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. Her research interests include transitions in care, and client- and family-centred care.