BOOKS
Coaching for Health: Why It Works and How To Do It
Jenny Rogers and Arti Maini
Open University Press/McGraw-Hill
978 03352 6230 4
4 out of 5
In Coaching for Health, the authors offer the exciting prospect of improving healthcare practitioner outcomes using coaching approaches. Healthcare practitioners ought to be able to do a better job if they have good interpersonal skills, show they care about their patients (assuming they do) and can devote time to integrating coaching skills in their practice. Not that this makes them coaches – an important distinction.
The book also offers a powerful critique of just how far medical model healthcare systems have given in to data, procedure, efficiency and seemingly thrown individuality, emotional suffering and respect overboard. As public health generally is embracing prevention, it would have been good to explore
what coaching for health offers before people end up at the healthcare practitioners in the first place. And what of coaching, maintaining wellness and managing relapse?
As a general introduction to integrating coaching into healthcare practitioner behaviour written for that audience, though, the book delivers.
Anthony Eldridge-Rogers is an executive recovery and wellness coach, trainer and author
Coaching Supervision: A Practical Guide For Supervisees
Carol Whitaker, David Clutterbuck and Michelle Lucas
Routledge
978 11389 2042 2
5 out of 5
As a practising coach and occupational psychologist, I was very interested to read this book. I have long been an active member of a peer coaching psychology supervision group and undertake supervision myself, though I am not always clear about exactly what supervision is or how best to use or offer it.
The book presents a thorough and accessible exploration of different models of supervision and raises many useful questions and ideas about how to form, and benefit from, a supervising relationship. The book’s structure is clear and I particularly like the way questions for reflection and more research are raised at the end of each chapter. The authors don’t try to impose ‘rules’ for supervision.
It has inspired me to think more carefully about my own reflective practices and supervision sessions as a supervisee, without looking for a single process or model, but rather, creating the conditions for a high quality, purposeful, reflective conversation. The book has given me much food for thought and good practical ideas to try out. I found it to be a great catalyst for discussion and practice in a sometimes bewildering field.
Sarah Dale is a coach and occupational psychologist with Creating Focus