Health coaching as a lifestyle medicine process in primary care

Lifestyle medicine is a relatively new approach to managing lifestyle-related disease. Health coaching is an integral part of lifestyle medicine that can be used to facilitate behaviour change in key lifestyle areas.The aim of this article is to familiarise general practitioners with the emerging discipline of health coaching and show its effectiveness in primary care.The recognition that the traditional healthcare approach is not fully effective at supporting health behaviour change in an era of chronic diseases has led to the emergence and growth of a new approach to the prevention and treatment of lifestyle-related diseases - the practice of health coaching.