Dorien Brouwer

53 Patient perspectives on health-related behavior change PART 1 Conclusion In conclusion, this study suggests that patients with recent TIA or ischemic stroke do not have a proactive approach towards health-related behavior change. Patients understand what constitutes a healthy lifestyle, but seem unable to adequately appraise their own health-related behavior. Practice implications In this study more than half of the patients felt no urgency to change their lifestyle. Patients indicated that knowledge and guidelines for healthy lifestyle can help in changing health behavior. Possibly these findings are related as patients are not able to assess their lifestyle properly as knowledge of what a healthy lifestyle entails is missing. Increasing knowledge could therefore not immediately increase the motivation for change, but possibly increase the awareness of what a healthy lifestyle consists of and how the patient’s current lifestyle relates to this. Increasing awareness could therefore be a first step towards change. In addition, self-efficacy also appears to play a major role in changing the lifestyle in this study. Future studies should therefore focus on investigating opportunities to effectively increase knowledge, awareness and self-efficacy to promote lifestyle change.