Primary Care Interventions II

Catalog description

This course will extend students' understandings of clinical health psychology interventions and outcomes within primary care settings. Patient-practitioner interactions, culturally competent health care delivery, and public health promotion serving culturally-diverse populations will be studied. Different levels of influence-lifestyle, social/community, gender, ethnicity, living/working conditions, and general socio-economic/environmental conditions--each bear relevance to evidence-based practice. Interventions will be considered in terms of technique, program, health-domain, and supra-paradigm. Throughout the course, future research possibilities will be noted and explored regarding both goal and method. Theoretical viewpoints bearing on models of human health-care motivation, ranging from social-cognition, to evolutionary biology, to psyche-soma dynamics, to behaviorism, to systems-theory, will be compared, and developmental and genetic factors will be highlighted. Key health domains such as exercise, weight (obesity), smoking, stress, hypertension, coronary heart disease, diabetes, sexual health, alcohol, other substance use, cancer, traumatic injury, chronic illness, and a spectrum of specific illnesses, will be addressed in terms of psychological assessment and intervention needs within primary health care delivery. Linkage between personality and physical illness will be considered regarding risk assessment, prevention, and health promotion. The bidirectionality of causal connection between psychological characteristics and physical illness demands careful clinical attention, and currently unanswered questions invite prospective research. Of particular importance will be the examination of anxiety, panic, and depression and their interrelationships with physical illnesses. Psychological factors related to adherence and resistance/nonadherence to pharmacologic…