Background: Therapy Description
A patient-centered approach is traditionally viewed as the most effective method for addressing health concerns, yet numerous impediments toward using the specified tool make it difficult to implement it. The use of the Cognitive Functional Therapy (CFT), in turn, is expected to help nurses and healthcare professionals to overcome the specified barrier to health promotion. By using the CFT, one will be able to connect functional and cognitive impediments to health promotion, thus causing a vast improvement within a community.
Preventing Disease, Promoting Health, and Restoring It
The application of CFT is expected to assist healthcare experts in managing public health issues. By applying CFT, one will construct a complex network of factors that affect health levels within a specific community (O’Keeffe et al., 2015). As a result, the framework for preventing diseases within the target setting will be built. Moreover, the selected tool will allow promoting health due to the emphasis on the cognitive aspect of the issue.
Specifically, patients will receive detailed instructions and the training based on cognitive behavioral principles (O’Keeffe et al., 2015). Hence, patients will develop the behaviors that will help them to avoid specific diseases and maintain the required health levels. Furthermore, the use of the CFT tool will allow restoring health through the development of confidence and self-esteem in patients.
Empowering Patients with the Help of the Therapy
The focus on building resilience and self-esteem in patients is of particularly high significance for the promotion of health. By emphasizing the role that patients play in the management of diseases and disorders, a nurse will provide a vulnerable population with the support required for it to gain crucial health management skills (O’Keeffe et al., 2015). By studying their own responses toward specific health factors and exploring their functionality, patients will develop health management skills that will allow them to identify health concerns and seek the required assistance.
Actions for Working with Patients
The application of the FCT principles suggests a certain paradigm of interacting with the target audience. Specifically, the CFT tool makes it possible for a nurse to design an individualized CFT approach, simultaneously enhancing communication with patients (O’Keeffe et al., 2015). The resulting improvement occurs due to the integration of the pragmatic approach and the opportunities for integrating several interventions within a single theoretical framework of FCT (O’Keeffe et al., 2015). Therefore, a nurse who utilizes the CFT approach has to construct improved communication channels for sustaining a nurse-patient dialogue. As a result, the length of the intervention and a patient’s hospital stay is minimized, which leads to a drop in the probability of nosocomial infections and the related comorbidities.
Therapy Limitations
Unfortunately, CFT incorporates several limitations that make it difficult to apply the theory in a certain setting. For example, the approach in question requires that nurses should be able to locate the areas that deserve particular attention, which may be quite difficult in the circumstances that involve time pressure and a vast range of health factors. Nonetheless, the specified disadvantage does not make the treatment process impossible.
Conclusion
The application of the CFT approach allows embracing a wide variety of factors that influence a patient’s health status and define the development of specific diseases and disorders. Therefore, using the proposed tool as the means of managing health concerns and advocating patient independence to encourage education of vulnerable groups should be deemed as necessary. The CFT framework enables nurses to improve communication with patients, which makes CFT particularly useful in the healthcare setting.
Reference
O’Keeffe, M., Purtill, H., Kennedy, N., O’Sullivan, P., Dankaerts, W., Tighe, A.,… O’Sullivan, K. (2015). Individualised cognitive functional therapy compared with a combined exercise and pain education class for patients with non-specific chronic low back pain: Study protocol for a multicentre randomised controlled trial. BMJ Open, 5(6), 1-10. Web.