Week 24: Designing behaviour change interventions

This week we looked into the five different strategies of health promotion and how behaviour science theories have been shown to have a positive impact in health interventions. Having the theory side under our belt, we began to follow the process of designing a behaviour change intervention. In the two hour workshop, I have learnt that I could draw parallel between designing a behaviour change intervention, making a lesson plan as a tutor, designing a marketing scheme for a new product etc. Their successes are all very much to the specificity of the target audience and behaviour, as well as identifying the change needed. This is a process of mapping the COM-B model into intervention and policies. 

Although some of us may argue that pharmacists are unlikely to design behaviour change interventions on their own, it is likely that the increasing involvement of pharmacists in primary care such as non-medical prescribers in GP surgeries and local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) or even in the six public health interventions per year imposed in the current Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework. I believe the actual evaluation process of considering all the factors that could contribute to a successful intervention is transferrable and applicable in many future roles of pharmacists in primary care. However I do believe a successful design and evaluation of a behaviour change intervention requires a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing expertise from clinicians of different specialities and pharmacists’ input in their expert of medicines can make them a valued member in the team. I am looking forward to applying this planning and evaluation approach in my future role as a community pharmacist.

Week 23: Health enhancing behaviour

Having touched on ‘why do people conduct behaviours that are harmful to their health despite knowing the risks’, we proceeded to look at the opposite side of the argument: why do people undertake health enhancing behaviours? What motivates them? This week’s reading contained two papers on the Self-motivating Model (SMM), identifying the different stages of motivated individuals and this model was tested on motivating people to eat their five-a-day and engage in more physical exercise. It has been found that the majority of people were in the extrinsic motivation category, when they were motivated by external reinforcement, personally held values to identified behaviours. The group of people more likely to continue with health enhancing behaviours were those intrinsically motivated (‘true’ self-regulation) when they were behaving as such for their own pleasure. Educational sessions within the research were aimed to help patients to reach self-regulation state. 

This made me reflect on myself and others in an educational setting: when others often refused to believe that I did not do as expected because they saw me as an intrinsically motivated individual. Relating to last week’s Motivational Interviewing, this made me think if it is possible to combine this and the Model in my future consultations. MI being the technique used to help patients find their motivation to engage in a health enhancing behaviour e.g. quit smoking and SMM as the model to monitor how motivated the patient is. As I wished to become a Pre-registration tutor a few years after I qualify, I am looking forward to applying this model to help my students, as much as my cello teacher taught me in a similar way to learn music ‘because we enjoy it’.