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The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion

The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion

An action plan is an important tool used in health care to collaboratively engage patients in a discussion concerning a change of behavior for better health outcomes. With the guidance of a health worker or a coach, patients identify the behavior they wish to change and they agree on a course of action that will help them achieve their goal using an action plan. Any aspect of the patient’s health can be targeted, whether emotional self-management that deals with responses to handling disability and discomfort or social self-management or socially changing behavior to prevent negative outcomes. The components of an action plan include: The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion

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  • Identifying a well-defined goal to be achieved –goals should be specific, achievable, timely, realistic, and measurable.
  • Creating a list of actions and tasks.
  • Setting a timeline for when tasks will be completed.
  • Allocating resources needed to complete the tasks (people, money, space).
  • Establishing measures to evaluate progress (Bailey, 2017).

The most important component of the action plan is goal setting (Bennett et al., 2017). This being the beginning of the action plan requires effort, willingness, and desire to change the behavior, and collaboration with the nurse practitioner to set a well-defined achievable goal. The outcome of an action plan is the achievement of goals, and this depends on creating well-defined goals since they assist individuals to focus their intentions and desires. The goal influences the other parts of the action plan. Once a goal has been identified, tasks and actions to achieve the goal are identified with ease, therefore, answering the question “how?”. The goal set aids patients to establish a criterion with which progress monitoring will use to measure success (Bailey, 2017)The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion.

The least important component in action planning is the timing and timeline. It is crucial to arrange the tasks in a chronological order assigned for specific times, however, this may not work for some action plans. Goals set should be achievable within a specific duration, however, this may fail to be reasonable when it comes to patients battling addictions, eating disorders, or people with chronic conditions. The timelines may require changing often. For instance, if afternoons are designated for walks, and the weather becomes unfavorable, it will require changing the times. Or physical activity is planned for 1 hour daily and after a while, you realize you can go up to 2 hours, but the timing can still change.  Action plans are designed to be of shorter durations (about 1-2 weeks), but what of patients with addictions? They require about 6-12 months to achieve recovery. Timelines may vary for patients with similar objectives or goals, as seen in chronically ill patients who need to learn to acclimate to their condition first, then change their behavior correspondingly (Lenzen et al., 2017)The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion.

Action planning is a crucial tool used in self-management processes. The overall end goal for an action plan is to help patients change their behavior, therefore, to improve their health status and quality of life, and enhance their self-efficacy. Consequently, this will also benefit the healthcare system by decreasing the use of healthcare services, hence reducing the financial pressure burden. Medical practitioners should be encouraged to integrate, discuss, and allow patients the opportunity to set easily achievable goals they are confident in attaining (Bennett et al., 2017)The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion.

References

Bailey, R. R. (2017). Goal Setting and Action Planning for Health Behavior Change. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 13(6), 615–618. https://doi.org/10.1177/1559827617729634

Bennett, M. I., Mulvey, M. R., Campling, N., Latter, S., Richardson, A., Bekker, H., Blenkinsopp, A., Carder, P., Closs, J., Farrin, A., Flemming, K., Gallagher, J., Meads, D., Morley, S., O’Dwyer, J., Wright-Hughes, A., & Hartley, S. (2017). Making action plans. In www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. NIHR Journals Library. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470120/

Lenzen, S. A., Daniëls, R., van Bokhoven, M. A., van der Weijden, T., & Beurskens, A. (2017). Disentangling self-management goal setting and action planning: A scoping review. PLOS ONE, 12(11), e0188822. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188822 The Important Components Of Action Plans Discussion