PUBLIC HEALTH
WHEN SOFT SKILLS CHANGE LIVES
Coaching, Communication and Behaviour Change in Health and Pharma
A case study spanning seven years of interconnected work across the NHS, pharmaceutical sector and public health - and the common thread that runs through all of it.
250 attendees each
Guy's & St Thomas'
The Common Thread
Over the past seven years, Russell Harvey of The Resilience Coach has been involved in a series of distinct but deeply interconnected pieces of work across the NHS and global pharmaceutical sector. At first glance these engagements look different: keynote speeches at transplant conferences, coaching skills workshops for pharmacists, allergy training academies, and county-wide NHS quality conversation programmes.
The thread running through all of them is the same.
Medical professionals are extraordinarily skilled at their clinical work. Their training is built, necessarily, on diagnosis, information and protocol. What it does not, by design, equip them with is the coaching and communication skills needed to enable genuine behaviour change in their patients. The consequence is a system where clinicians feel frustrated that their excellent clinical advice is not being acted upon, patients feel overwhelmed by information without feeling supported to change, and health services strain under demand that could be reduced through better conversations.
The work Russell has delivered is designed to close that gap - one conversation at a time, one professional at a time, and one conference at a time. Cumulatively, the impact is significant.
THE COMMUNICATION FOR EMPOWERMENT TRIANGLE
Central to Russell’s work in health and pharma is a bespoke framework called the Communication for Empowerment Triangle. Developed specifically for healthcare professionals, it provides a simple, memorable structure for thinking about the balance of a patient conversation.
Sharing Information
Providing Support
Sharing Information
Sharing Information
Sharing Information
Enabling Behaviour Change
The three points of the triangle are:
▸ Sharing Information
providing the right clinical knowledge, at the right time, in the right way
▸ Providing Support
Empathising, listening actively, building trust and acknowledging the patient’s experience
▸ Enabling Behaviour Change
Coaching, positively challenging, building autonomy and helping the patient identify their own resources and agency
The insight that lands every time is this: most healthcare professionals spend the overwhelming majority of their consultation time in the first segment - sharing information. They are exceptionally good at it. But if a patient already knows what they need to do, more information does not help them do it. What they need is someone who can move them through the triangle.
As Russell typically opens these sessions: “You’ve spent two days in brilliant medical and technical conversations about what you’re already excellent at. And you’ve allocated 45 minutes to your own resilience and communication. That tells you something about where the gap is.”
THE JOURNEY: HOW ONE CONVERSATION LED TO ANOTHER
2020: BRITISH TRANSPLANTATION SOCIETY KEYNOTE
Russell was invited to speak on Resilience to 100 NHS professionals attending the British Transplantation Society conference. The session was an acknowledgement from within the medical community that healthcare professionals - who dedicate their careers to looking after others - often neglect their own resilience and wellbeing.
One attendee was Shumila Khanna, a Marketing Director at pharmaceutical company Astellas. She was struck by Russell’s style and approach and invited him to speak at the Astellas Renal Transplant Conference.
“Everyone needs a Resilience Coach.”
ASTELLAS RENAL TRANSPLANT CONFERENCE
At the Astellas symposium Russell delivered a keynote on building resilience — directly challenging the audience of transplant professionals to examine how much time they invested in their own wellbeing compared to their clinical work. The global lead for transplantation closed the session with the remark that has stayed with Russell since: “Everyone needs a Resilience Coach.”
AGB PHARMA CONFERENCE — COMMUNICATION FOR EMPOWERMENT (250 ATTENDEES)
Shumila moved to AGB Pharma, where she faced a different but related challenge: medical professionals were not having the right style of conversations with families of children with ADHD to support them in transitioning to a new medication that enabled better sleep. The drug was good. The conversations around it were not enabling families to feel confident making the switch.
Russell created the Communication for Empowerment Triangle and facilitated sessions with 250 healthcare professionals. The delegates recognised immediately that they spent too much time sharing information and not enough time enabling behaviour change. Feedback was consistently described as simple, engaging and effective.
The commercial and human outcome: more families supported to make the transition, better outcomes for children, and a measurable increase in prescriptions.
ALLERGY EXCHANGE — AIMMUNE SPONSORED CONFERENCE (250 ATTENDEES)
Shumila moved again — this time to Aimmune - and the challenge was consistent: families of children with peanut allergies were not transitioning to a potentially life-changing drug. Russell was invited to deliver the Communication for Empowerment session at the Allergy Exchange Conference. The audience of 250 NHS professionals produced the same insight: too much time in information mode, not enough time coaching and empowering families to take ownership.
The feedback was exceptional. The same shift in professional self-awareness that had happened at AGB Pharma was now happening in allergy care.
GUY’S & ST THOMAS’ HOSPITAL - ALLERGY ACADEMY (4 CONSECUTIVE YEARS)
One attendee at the Allergy Exchange was the Director of Nursing for Allergies at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. Impressed with what she had seen, she invited Russell to deliver the Communication for Empowerment session at the Trust’s annual Allergy Academy - a flagship event that upskills medical professionals from across the UK in supporting children and families with allergies and skin conditions.
The particular challenge at the Academy is that these families - often with teenagers - need to take genuine ownership and responsibility for their own medical care. That requires something beyond information. It requires coaching.
Russell has been invited back for four consecutive years. The session has grown to include communication styles and a deeper dive into coaching skills. Feedback has been outstanding in every year.
STRENGTHS-BASED QUALITY CONVERSATIONS: NHS DERBYSHIRE
Alongside the pharmaceutical and conference work, Russell has been an Associate Facilitator for North West Employers on a long-running and nationally significant project for the County of Derbyshire: Strengths-Based Quality Conversations for NHS professionals.
The programme started as a one-and-a-half day face-to-face workshop, delivered by Russell across Derbyshire approximately 25 times. Delegates from across NHS roles attended — nurses, GPs, allied health professionals, social workers — with a clear purpose: to equip them with strengths-based coaching skills that could sit alongside their clinical expertise, enabling patients to do more for themselves.
The programme has continued, been renewed, and evolved. For the past three years a team of three facilitators has delivered approximately four virtual sessions per month, each with an average of 12 delegates. This represents ongoing delivery of hundreds of sessions and thousands of NHS professionals touched over the life of the programme.
The programme covers: quality coaching conversations; Strengths-based leadership; self-management and mental health; and a deeper dive into behaviour change techniques. Additional specialist sessions for clinical leaders have been developed and integrated over the course of the programme.
The Research Foundation: Why This Works
The approach Russell delivers is grounded in an increasingly robust evidence base. The case for coaching and strengths-based conversations in healthcare settings has grown significantly over the past decade.
“Health coaching can equip staff with additional conversational skills, techniques and the mind-set to support and empower patients toward their own goals and aspirations. There is an emerging evidence base which indicates the benefits of health coaching in bringing about greater patient satisfaction and adherence, improved health behaviours and outcomes, as well as potentially improving care cost efficiencies.””
A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and referenced by NCBI Bookshelf found that health coaching interventions are associated with meaningful improvements in patient self-management, physical activity, and adherence to medication. The effect is enhanced when coaches are better trained and more practised.
Research on strengths-based approaches to chronic disease management, published in NCBI (PMC8091945), notes that the strengths-based model “assumes that individuals have the capacity to grow, do the best they can, and know what is best for them” - and that when patients are engaged from a strengths perspective, outcomes improve across multiple domains including mental health, medication adherence and recovery.
NHS England’s Core20PLUS5 framework and the Health and Care Act 2022 both emphasise the role of personalised care, self-management and strengths-based approaches in reducing health inequalities. The BMA’s toolkit for clinicians notes that “self-care reduces attendance to health services” and that strengths-based approaches to patient groups can “empower individuals to help other patients as well as themselves.”
*Key references: NHS England Health Coaching Quality Framework (HEE); Identifying Patient Strengths Instruments, NCBI PMC8091945 (2021); Health coaching for long-term conditions (StACC), NCBI PMC12225140; BMA Toolkit: Reducing health inequalities in your local area (2024); NHS England Core20PLUS5 framework.
The Benefits: Individual, Organisational and Systemic
For Patients
▸ Improved confidence, empowerment and self-responsibility
▸ Greater ownership of health decisions and treatment plans
▸ Reduced dependency on repeated appointments and interventions
▸ Better adherence to medication and treatment regimes
▸ Improved resilience — the capacity to manage and thrive within their own health challenge
For Medical Professionals
▸ Feeling of greater impact and genuine connection with patients
▸ Reduced frustration from conversations that previously felt unproductive
▸ Improved confidence in communication and behaviour change conversations
▸ Better personal wellbeing and resilience — they feel like they are making a difference
▸ Enhanced professional identity: from information provider to trusted coach and enabler
For Health Systems and Organisations
▸ Reduction in inappropriate appointments and unnecessary clinical contacts
▸ Reduced cost from avoidable prescriptions, additional interventions and repeated consultations
▸ Improved system resilience — services able to cope with and respond to demand more sustainably
▸ Better alignment with NHS Long Term Plan and Core20PLUS5 health inequality priorities
▸ Demonstrable return on investment from communication skills training
THE CONNECTING THREAD: RESILIENCE AT EVERY LEVEL
What is striking about this body of work is not any single engagement. It is the pattern that emerges across all of them.
When a healthcare professional learns to move their patient conversations from information delivery to behaviour change enablement, they are building resilience. In the patient: the capacity to manage their own condition, make decisions for themselves and spring forward with learning. In themselves: the satisfaction, impact and professional energy that comes from doing their job well. In the system: the cumulative reduction in unnecessary demand and the improved outcomes that follow.
This is the definition of resilience that underpins all of Russell Harvey’s work: not bouncing back, but springing forward with learning. At an individual, team, organisational and societal level.
Soft skills are not soft. They are the lever that makes everything else work
READY TO MOVE FORWARD?
READY TO BUILD RESILIENT LEADERS IN YOUR ORGANISATION?
Russell Harvey works with senior leadership teams navigating change, pressure and uncertainty.
From individual resilience coaching to whole-organisation development programmes.