Consumer Engagment

Consumer Engagement

Engaging consumers in care and health behavior change is critical to their health and wellbeing. CIHS collects resources to inform your efforts to better engage and support consumers as they build new behaviors to achieve and maintain better health. 

Check out the eSolutions article:  Health Behavior Change Consumer Engagement (Part 1 in a series) to learn more Health behavior changes, like changing eating or exercise habits, which can profoundly affect the overall health of individuals with mental illnesses and addictions.

Resources

The NIDRR-funded Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Participation and Community Living of Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities announced the publication of Helping People Connect to the Religious Congregations and Spiritual Groups of Their Choice: The Role of Peer Specialists, a new monograph exploring the roles of peer specialists in helping the people they serve to connect to the mainstream religion congregations and spiritual groups of their choice. This monograph is part of a series of documents that explores the roles that peer specialists play in promoting community inclusion of service recipients in a variety of life domains.

Psychosocial Processes of Health Behaviour Change in a Lifestyle found that Interventions should focus on improving participants’ self-efficacy early on in the intervention, as well as prompting action and coping planning for health behaviour change. Such changes are likely to be similarly effective among intervention participants regardless of gender and educational level. Agentic orientation may operate via helping women to be less affected by the demands of the self-sacrificing female role and enabling them to assertively focus on their own goals. The earlier mixed results regarding the role of social support in behaviour change may be in part explained by personality traits such as communion.

Webinars

SAMHSA Resource Center to Promote Acceptance, Dignity and Social Inclusion Associated with Mental Health (ADS Center) webinar on social inclusion: Peer-Driven Innovations: Changing Systems, Changing Lives