Disseminating and evaluating e-health interventions in public health settings Seminar

One of the roles of health psychology is to improve health and prevent disease by encouraging and supporting people to change health-related behaviour.  Psychologists are increasingly doing this by developing e-health interventions such as website and smartphone apps. Some of the recognized benefits of such intervention modalities are that they can have high reach whilst maintaining low cost per user, meaning that they might be suitable for large scale dissemination at the community (i.e. public health) level .

In this talk we present findings from a programme of research that has resulted from a collaboration between health psychologists from the Centre for Applications of Health Psychology at Southampton and public health commissioners in the North East of the UK, a region that suffers from a disproportionate burden of ill health. For example, recent (2012) data shows that 68% of adults are either overweight or obese in the region compared to the England average of 63.8%.

We will present findings from a randomised controlled trial where 786 participants from a community sample in the North East of the UK used a web-based weight management intervention ("POWeR") either with or without telephone coaching to explore whether adding human support to web-based interventions boosts engagement and outcomes.   We will also describe preliminary insights from an ongoing study where the POWeR website plus a POWeR smartphone app is being disseminated in workplaces with more than 42,000 employees and outline an upcoming study where we will disseminate a web and smartphone based stress management tool. We will describe lessons learned from these roll-outs of health psychology interventions and discuss some of the opportunities and challenges that can arise from collaborations between academic health psychologists and public health commissioners.