St Ives, Primary Care Network, Cambridgeshire

Health And Wellbeing

Health and Wellbeing Coaches

Health and Wellbeing Coaches are experts in supporting people with behaviour change and setting realistic personalised goals. They also provide access to information and resources to help people build knowledge, confidence and skills as they work their health goals.  Health and Wellbeing coaches can support people with achieving their health goals, such as weight management, healthy eating, increasing activity levels and reducing stress.

Our Health and Wellbeing Coaches work as part of the Personalised Care Team within the St Ives Primary Care Network and support people in taking proactive steps to improve the way they manage their health, based on what matters to them.

There are a number of approaches designed to help improve your health and wellbeing. Most people know they need to adopt more healthy behaviours, but can find putting this into practice difficult. Many people are also managing long-term health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, coronary heart disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, amongst many others.

A health professional may have talked to you about a referral for health coaching to help support you to manage your health condition or to support you to improve your health and wellbeing.

Health coaching will help you learn new skills and build your confidence to enable you to reach your health and wellbeing goals.

Your coach will work alongside you to discover what your health and wellbeing goals are over an agreed number of sessions. Health coaching will enable you to explore your values in relation to your health and wellbeing and explore the reasons you want to change your health behaviours. Using a range of resources in partnership with your coach you will agree what is possible and create goals of your choosing.

Health Coaching will enable you to:

– Establish step by step goals

– Learn new skills

– Be persistent

– Reward success

– Seek support

– Take one day at a time

– Focus on one behaviour change at a time

It may also include:

– Providing access to information and resources to help you to build your knowledge, confidence and skills.

– Linking you to other services

Studies show that health coaching can build your knowledge, confidence and skills to help you to manage your long-term condition(s). People who have had health coaching report feeling more confident and have better health outcomes. Health coaching will help you to take a more active role in managing your health and wellbeing.

Even though our Health and Wellbeing Coaches are based in a surgery, they work across the whole of St Ives Primary Care Network.

Carolyn Parkin

  • Background in Psychology and Education​ 
  • Joined in September 2022 
  • Based at Spinney Surgery ​

Kajal Karki

  • Background in Public Health and Health Studies. 
  • Joined in May 2023.​ 
  • Based at Spinney Surgery. ​ 
Click Here to Self Refer to our Health and Wellbeing Coaches

Links to Organisations we work with:

Click Here to visit our ‘Cancer Awareness’ Page