Chronic disease prevention, which primarily involves changing people’s health-related behaviour, is the most pressing current and future health challenge in Ireland. Delivery of brief interventions for behaviour change within health services has the potential to reduce escalating rates of chronic disease and associated burden on our health services.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) Making Every Contact Count (MECC) Programme, initiated in 2017, enables healthcare professionals to discuss lifestyle risk factors with patients and offer brief interventions during routine healthcare contacts. International evidence suggests that implementing a national behaviour change programme can be challenging. The ability of MECC to reach its potential and positively impact on public health is dependent on its widespread uptake and successful implementation.
The Health Behaviour Change Research Group and the HSE MECC Team have collaboratively developed this proposal. We aim to develop the collaborative implementation strategy to optimise and scale up MECC.
In Work Package (WP) 1, we will determine health professional-level and organisational-level barriers to, and enablers of, the implementation of MECC using a mixed methods approach to include:
a national survey of healthcare professionals (n=420) who have participated in MECC and
a qualitative study (n=24), taking a positive deviance approach, within four exemplar health service sites to understand staff and organisational factors related to successful implementation.
In WP2 we will examine patient attitudes towards, and experiences of, MECC using qualitative interviews with patients (n=24).
In WP3 we will:
explore international evidence on barriers and facilitators to the implementation of behaviour change interventions programmes using rapid review methods;
develop testable implementation strategies for the improved implementation of MECC in practice, through the use of the Behaviour Change Wheel approach; and
engage key stakeholders, through a consensus process, to develop a collaborative implementation blueprint to optimise and scale-up MECC.
