Using health psychology to help patients: promoting healthy choices

This article describes behaviour change techniques that nurses can use to help individual patients to make and stick to healthy choices. These include helping patients to set goals that are specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and timely (SMART), promoting self-monitoring and providing feedback and motivational interviewing. The process for delivering these techniques is described and the evidence for them discussed. Simply providing brief advice and follow up can lead to behaviour change, even in people who have not expressed a desire to change. The techniques are designed to be brief and feasible to use in routine practice. Using them can help nurses to apply the NHS policy of Making Every Contact Count so that their patients achieve long-term benefit.