Clinical Counseling With The Microlife MedGem And BodyGem
The Microlife BodyGem and MedGem indirect calorimeters help you assess your clients unique nutritional needs.
The Five A’s Construct for Clinical Counseling on Excess Body weight.
The Five A’s construct (ask, advise, assess, assist, arrange) was originally developed by the National Cancer Institute to guide physician intervention in smoking cessation.
The U.S. Public Health Service used the A’s construct to report on high-quality, controlled clinical trials in tobacco cessation, many conducted in primary care settings to test brief, feasible population-level interventions.
The A’s construct has also been applied to brief primary care interventions for a variety of other behaviors.
The following terminology is used to describe minimal contact interventions for WatchWT that are provided in the physician office setting:
- Ask: Ask about/assess body weight and factors affecting choice of behavior change goals/methods.
- Advise: Give clear, specific, and personalized behavior change advice, including information about personal health harms/benefits of excess body weight.
- Assess: Assess specific nutrition (i.e. measure RMR), physical activity, and psychosocial constructs. Collaboratively select appropriate treatment goals and methods based on the patient’s interest in and willingness to change the behavior.
- Assist: Using behavior change techniques (self-help and/or counseling), aid the patient in achieving agreed-upon goals by acquiring the skills, confidence, and social/environmental supports for behavior change.
- Arrange: Schedule follow-up contacts (in person or by telephone) to provide ongoing assistance/support and to adjust the treatment plan as needed, including referral to more intensive or specialized treatment.
Rationale and Strategies for Implementing the Five A’s
The content of each step in the Five A’s construct necessarily varies from behavior to behavior, but clinical intervention targeting any behavior change can be described with reference to these five intervention components.
While we promote the idea of a unifying construct to describe behavioral counseling interventions across behaviors, we acknowledge that the type and intensity of behavior change strategies needed may vary by the complexity of the change, whether the behavior is being added or deleted, and by individual factors.
Our brief description of each “A” of this unifying construct uses selected examples to detail current options and challenges in providing behavioral counseling interventions for patients with excess body weight.
The BodyGem® and MedGem® devices by Microlife are tools that will provide information vital for determining a personalized calorie budget, based on individual metabolism, necessary to achieve and maintain proper weight and nutrition.
Additionally, the BodyGem and MedGem devices play a significant role in providing individual’s daily caloric needs to improve individual care through nutrition assessment.
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Contact me at 1-800-743-3328 to discuss Microlife BodyGem RMR System Kit pricing options.
Harvey Harris