A New Conceptualization and Approach to Learning and Teaching Motivational Interviewing

Introduction The purpose of this article is to describe three innovations: 1) the development of traditional motivational interviewing within substance abuse counseling; 2) our development of a new conceptual approach to motivational interviewing in health care; and 3) our development of an eight hour e-learning program to teach this approach to motivational interviewing in a more accessible, affordable and standardized format. The progression of the article is as follows: 1) we briefly describe the development of motivational interviewing (MI) and its impact on health behavior change (assuming the reader has had some exposure to motivational interviewing concepts); 2) we describe how and why we have reformulated Miller's original approach to MI to fit the training and needs of health care professionals (HCPs); and 3) we describe the thinking and reasoning that went into the development of an eight hour MI e-learning program. Our overarching purpose is to describe how we came to formulate our approach to motivational interviewing in health care based on 25 years of teaching MI using both traditional approaches to MI and our new approach. The reader is referred to our book, Motivational Interviewing for Health Care Professionals: A Sensible Approach 1 for further elaboration of these concepts and their evolution in health care.