Being Flexible While Maintaining Fidelity for Medical Patients

For health psychologists, flexibility within fidelity is required to address the individual patient factors resulting from the dual physical and psychosocial comorbidities that characterize medical populations, and the contextual factors arising from the complexities of medical settings and multidisciplinary medical teams. This chapter presents a model for flexibility within fidelity for medical populations, addressing flexibility both in the delivery of treatments to patients (i.e., patient-centered flexibility) and in collaborations with multidisciplinary medical teams (i.e., team-based flexibility). We provide examples from our clinical research to illustrate how flexibility within fidelity can be employed for medical patients and offer recommendations to health psychology researchers and providers for exercising thoughtful clinical decision-making in the delivery of evidence-based interventions.