"From Health Experts to Health Guides": Motivational Interviewing Learning Processes and Influencing Factors.

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Behavioral Science
• Primary Care Practice

Background:

• Motivational interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based counseling approach with suboptimal clinical use due to understudied learning processes.
• Primary care clinicians face challenges in counseling, necessitating effective training in MI.

Purpose of the Study:

• To facilitate and describe primary care clinicians' professional transformation through interprofessional communities of practice focused on MI (ICP-MI).
• To integrate and present a comprehensive understanding of MI learning processes and their influencing factors.

Main Methods:

• Participatory action research involving 16 primary care clinicians.
• Data collection through researcher's journal, participant observation (76 hours), and focus groups (8 hours).
• Inductive qualitative data analysis performed by co-participants.

Main Results:

• Learning MI necessitates a paradigm shift from "health expert" to "health guide."
• Learning involved initial openness to the MI spirit, followed by iterative embodiment and skill-building.
• Intrinsic factors (clinician traits/background) and extrinsic factors (expert care culture) influenced learning.

Conclusions:

• MI learning is an integrated process influenced by personal, professional, and cultural factors.
• Findings inform the development of effective MI training and implementation programs for clinicians.
• Further research is needed to advance knowledge on health education in primary care.