A Phone Coaching Intervention to Improve Blood Pressure and Hypertension Self-management Practices in a Community-Based Setting: Pilot Study

Hypertension is common in the African American (AA) community, and AAs have disproportionately lower rates of blood pressure control in comparison to other races. Because hypertension self-management practices are performed mostly by patients and family members, there is a critical need to acquire adequate hypertension self-management practices. Phone Coaching (PC) has been supported in the literature as an effective intervention to improve hypertension self-management practices. The purpose of this project was to pilot test a 12-week hypertension self-management program with a phone coaching component for AAs in a community-based setting to improve blood pressure measures and self-management practices. All participants received the 31-item Hypertension Self-Care Activity Level Effects (H-SCALE) scale; 21 participants (N) (14 women and 7 men) completed the project. The post-intervention results after 12 weeks of phone coaching showed a significant reduction in diastolic blood pressure values (p = 0.0281). Designing and implementing culturally tailored hypertension self-management programs with phone coaching in community-based settings are practical and necessary to reduce the disparity in hypertension for African Americans. This short-duration intervention project may be more practical in reaching this underserved population in the community.