The Role of a Health Trainer

The Health Trainer is a new role within the NHS. There role is to help people to change behaviours that are known to cause ill-health.

The Health Trainers role is to help those people whose initial self-assessment indicates that they are at significant risk of poor health will be able to discuss the outcome with a Health Trainer. The discussion will include looking at what action they can take to improve their own health, for example through diet and exercise. It will also cover the further help they might want to seek from local services, including where appropriate, referral to seek medical advice and follow-up from specialist services and the development of a personal health plan.

The Health Trainers role is much more than advice and support. It involves training people in skills to actively set their own behavioural goals and manage their own behaviour and, more broadly, events and circumstances in their lives that they would like to change. In targeting those people who would like to change behaviours relevant to their health, and have previously been "hard to reach" via other services, Health Trainers have the potential to reduce health inequalities.

Extracts taken from "Our Health, Our Care, Our Say" The Government White Paper 2004.