Introduction: What is health management?
Health management is an essential task for maintaining a person’s overall health and well-being, particularly for people experiencing homelessness who have increased prevalence and higher onset of chronic health conditions (Gutman et al., 2018b). Health management is defined as “activities related to developing, managing, and maintaining health and wellness routines, including self-management, with the goal of improving or maintaining health to support participation in other occupations (daily life activities)” (American Occupational Therapy Association, 2020). It is all the health-related tasks that occur outside of direct medical care, including managing medications, use of medical equipment, diet, and exercise.
Health management is made up of several different activities and skills and is a complex process, especially for those managing multiple and/or chronic health conditions, which is further complicated when a person is unhoused, and lacks access to critical resources to safely complete health management skills.
How to use this tookit
This toolkit is a companion to the Clinical Guidelines: The Importance of Assessing and Addressing Health Management. Once health center or medical respite program staff have assessed and person’s health management skills and areas needed for skill building, they can use this toolkit to guide education and intervention.
This toolkit provides guidance and resources to address the following areas of health management:
- Assessing Organizational Approach to Health Management
- Assessing Individual Health Management
- Health Literacy
- Medication Self-Management
- Physical Skills for Health Management
- Time Management
- Self-Advocacy and Communication
- Self-Assessment and Decision Making
Each of the sections provides different levels of recommendations or strategies:
- Organizational Level Strategies: These strategies are approaches that address systems or structures within an organization that can promote health management among their patient population. Organizational strategies require leadership buy-in and support so that entire health care teams are using strategies across their patient population.
- Adaptive Strategies: These strategies focus on minimizing or mitigating barriers to health management by changing the environment, components of the activity, or providing tools/devices to compensate for areas of difficulty, impairments, or lack of skills. Adaptive strategies are useful to help a person quickly be able to manage a task or decrease risk and safety concerns. Adaptive strategies may be the most appropriate place to start, while continued effort and time can focus on further skill building.
- Skill Building: These strategies focus on developing new skills, methods, or techniques with the client so that they can independently (or more independently) complete health management tasks. Skill building requires specific, organized approaches to learn new skills, and often requires multiple opportunities to practice over time, with decreasing levels of support from the provider. Skill building is appropriate when there is a skill that the person needs to learn to manage independently, adaptive strategies are not available, existing supports are temporary, or the person is motivated or interested in being more independent in a skill.
View this video on Skill Building to learn how to implement strategies to build new skills for health management:
If your program or organization is new to addressing health management or does not have a systematic approach to identifying health management needs, please start with Assessing Organizational Approach to Health Management.
Health Management Toolkit
This toolkit was supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of an award totaling $1,788,315 with 0% percentage financed with non-governmental sources. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit HRSA.gov.
