Application of Psychology in Healthcare:

 Health Psychology: 

Healthy Mind Healthy Body

Health psychology is a special area that focuses on how biology, psychology, behavior, and social factors influence health and illness.

Psychologists play a major role in the:

• Promotion of healthy behavior
• Prevention of diseases
• Improving patients' quality of life.
• Health psychologists apply psychological research and methods for many purposes:
• For the Maintenance of health.
• For the identification of psychological factors that contribute to physical illness.
• For the betterment of the health care system.
• For the formulation of health-related policies.

Health psychologists use psychological science to promote health, prevent illness and improve health care systems.

Application of Psychology in Healthcare:

The clinical role of psychologists as health providers is diverse with varying areas of caregiving (primary, secondary and tertiary care) and a variety of subspecialties.

• Comprehension of the Patient Behavior: It appreciates the way how we can comprehend the behavior of the patient to utilize appropriate psychological intervention from them.

• Behavioral Therapeutic Intervention: It provides a better understanding of the relationship of the illness and the proper way to conduct behavioral therapeutic intervention using an effective communication process.

• Effective Coping Mechanism: It ensures effective coping mechanisms to reduce the risks of stress-related illness as the result of illness including the feeling of pain in the health recovery of patients.

• Behavioral Influence: It informs the relationship of behavior and its influence on the well-being of the patient.

• Lifestyle Affecting Behaviors: It helps the physician to explain the health-related behaviors that are affected by the lifestyle (such as personal vices of smoking, drinking, drug addiction, etc.) and its health consequences.

• Teaching and Training Programs: It helps in developing, delivering, and evaluating health psychology teaching and training programs.

• Advice and Support: Health Psychologists can provide advice and support to other health care professionals to enable them to use psychological theories and methods in their work (e.g., to understand patients' illness beliefs and communicate risk information).

• Interventions: It helps in developing and evaluating interventions to enhance patient self-management/ health-related behavior (e.g., smoking cessation, weight management).