About this Research Topic

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on both mental and physical health with documented and ongoing effects on the health status of populations globally. One of the key drivers of these trends is the increase in risk factors and unhealthy behaviors in the population (eg. obesity, smoking, alcohol consumption) and poor adherence to health screening, vaccination, or other preventative interventions. This has increased the importance of actions toward disease prevention with a focus on health behavior change. It is recognized that such intervention approaches should be grounded in the principles of person-centered approaches and include patient empowerment, and compassionated care provision, with the aim to facilitate the complex interactions between mental and physical health and effective communication between healthcare professionals and patients. Sharing international learning and best practices for promoting health behavior change using empowerment-oriented approaches is key to supporting the rapid scale-up of effective intervention strategies and will inform research and policy.

This Research Topic will focus on best and promising practices of empowerment-oriented strategies for supporting health behavior change. This collection of multidisciplinary articles (original research, reviews, systematic reviews, and opinions) will examine methodologies that address individuals, populations, as well as healthcare professionals that aim to reduce the risk of disease, promote healthy behaviors or enhance adherence to healthcare interventions.

The scope of this Research Topic is to give prominence to health interventions and community initiatives that promote patient empowerment toward behavior change for preventing chronic and non-communicable diseases. Among the themes that this topic aims to include are:

a) interventions and initiatives to address chronic disease risk factors including smoking cessation, alcohol use reduction, and physical exercise improvement

b) interventions and initiatives to improve self-management and care of chronic diseases, including adherence to medicine and other therapies

c) interventions and initiatives to prevent communicable/infectious disease and associated behaviors such as vaccination and other preventative interventions and policies

d) experience and interventions focused on transferring effective interventions into complex settings and contexts with a focus on multimorbidity and frailty

We also welcome research from low-resource settings and deprived populations looking at behavior change and patient empowerment, including tailoring and adapting interventions from higher-income settings.

Keywords: empowerment, patient-centeredness, health behavior, care, patient

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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