Health trainers provide practical support to their customers to modify their behavior and achieve their own health goals.
Working life
Health trainers assist their customers to evaluate their wellness and lifestyles, set goals for improving their health, concur action-plans, and offer practical support and information which can help people change their behavior. This may include promoting the advantages of:
- taking regular exercise and eating healthily
- reducing alcohol intake
- breastfeeding
- practising safe sex
- stopping smoking
Working as a health trainer, you could be:
- Helping people identify how their behaviors may be affecting their health
- Supporting people to create a health plan to assist make changes to improve their health
- Assisting individuals to become more knowledgeable about things that can affect their health and wellbeing
- Signposting to other professionals and agencies
Who will you work with?
For a health trainer, you will be knowledgeable about the health problems that affect the community you’re working in. The customers that you work with may be identified from existing community and service groups, through referrals (such as from a health professional at a children’s center ) or through self-referral. Your customers will come from disadvantaged groups like travellers, the homeless and people with alcohol, drug and addiction issues.
While a lot of your work may be on a one-to-one foundation, there are times when you might be working with groups of individuals, such as delivering group sessions on behavior change and health improvement.
Health coaches may also be assisted in their work by members of their community who were trained to be gym champions (HTCs are usually volunteers who have undertaken health improvement training in level 2 with the Royal Society of Public Health, and that will help health trainer solutions to expand their reach in communities).
Where will you work?
Health trainers often work for private businesses which offer a health trainer support for the NHS or for a local authority. They may work for a charity, a local authority or the NHS, from the services or the prison service.