Real Behavior Change in Primary Care: Improving Patient Outcomes and Increasing Job Satisfaction

A Toolkit for Creating Lasting Behavior Change in Your Patients

As a primary care provider, you are on the front lines of medical treatment. Oftentimes, you're the first medical professional patients come to when they experience problems with their health. While some of these problems can be resolved by traditional medical treatment, many others are driven by underlying psychological issues and unhealthy lifestyle choices that you may feel powerless to affect. Between repeat patient visits and the frustrating progression of preventable symptoms and conditions, it's no wonder so many medical and behavioral health providers feel burned out and at a loss for effective solutions.

This guide was designed to help you find those solutions and recapture the ability to effectively help patients achieve optimal health and happiness. Real Behavior Change in Primary Care offers ten-minute interventions that provide your patients with the tools they need to change unworkable and unhealthy behaviors. Each short yet powerful intervention utilizes empirically supported skills from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, to help you empower patients to take charge of the psychological blocks that keep them from resolving their health problems. You'll also apply ACT skills to your own life and learn to better manage stress, recover from burnout, and rediscover the meaning behind your work as a health care provider.

Help patients suffering with:
• Chronic disease
• Alcohol and substance abuse
• Chronic pain
• Anxiety and depression
• Trauma and abuse

Patricia J. Robinson, PhD, is director of training and program evaluation at Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc., a firm that assists health care systems with integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings. She is coauthor of Real Behavior Change in Primary Care and The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression. After exploring primary care psychology as a researcher, she devoted her efforts to its dissemination in rural America, urban public health departments, and military medical treatment facilities.

Debra A. Gould, MD, MPH, is associate clinical professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has practiced family medicine and taught medical students and family medicine residents for more than seventeen years. Her interests include evidence-based practice, mental health issues in primary care, community medicine, practice-based research, and physician wellness.

Kirk D. Strosahl, PhD, is cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a cognitive behavioral approach that has gained widespread adoption in the mental health and substance abuse communities. He is coauthor of Brief Interventions for Radical Change and In This Moment. Strosahl provides training and consultation services for Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc. He is a pioneer in the movement to bring behavioral health services into primary care.