Improving the Mental Health of Home Health Aides

The Living Healthy intervention is an 8-session health education program with cognitive behavioral training (CBT) techniques. For those in the interventional arm, the Living Healthy intervention program will be delivered by trained peer coaches by telephone or Zoom over 3 months. In this study, trained peer coaches are trained home health aides themselves. Informed by social cognitive theory (SCT), peer coaches train participants on cognitive behavior techniques and empower participants to adopt positive health behaviors through personalized goal setting, motivational interviewing, and peer modeling. Each content-based session incorporates principles of CBT, teaching participants to recognize and modify negative thinking and modifying outcome expectations through self-monitoring, reflection, and practice.

Participants assigned to receive health education alone will be asked to read health education (online; covering aspects of the Living Healthy program) which corresponds to a weekly topic about health. They will be called by a research assistant each week to prompt them to do this and answer any questions they might have about the materials.