Public health improvement through behaviour change training for health and social care staff
A team from the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit led by Drs Wendy Lawrence (pictured) and Mary Barker, both psychologists, have published this week in the Journal of Health Psychology a study described by the journal’s editor as ‘epic work’ and ‘of major importance’.
In a research paper and accompanying editorial, the authors detail the development and testing of a programme of training for health and social care staff in skills to support behaviour change. They propose this as a cheap, sustainable and population-level method for addressing the global epidemic of chronic disease.
Fundamentally preventing chronic disease has to involve change in human behaviour. With funding from the NIHR Nutrition Biomedical Research Centre, the team has shown their training programme to change the way frontline health and social care staff work with patients and clients. The training has been trialed in Southampton with 148 SureStart Children’s Centre staff who showed sustained use of their new skills at three time points up to a year post-training. They created more opportunities to discuss health behaviours, used more open discovery questions, listened, reflected and set goals with patients signifcantly more than untrained staff. The paper concludes that it is possible to train staff with a wide range of backgrounds and qualifications in skills to support behaviour change, and because it uses existing services to deliver support for individual-level behaviour change, this training intervention has the potential to improve public health at relatively low cost.
In their editorial, the authors make the point that health psychology has made significant progress in identifying what it takes to change health behaviour, but that it therefore time for more health psychologists to apply that knowledge at scale to address the current public health crisis.