The East Midlands Health Trainer Partnership Hub has been commissioned to develop guidance to help support a consistent approach to improving lifestyles though influencing health seeking behaviour change.
The guidance will be based on the approach ‘making every contact count’. This approach emphasises the importance of short, one to one opportunities with service users by anyone in the health and social care workforce (NHS and none NHS settings) to make every contact one that promotes positive lifestyle behaviour choices. It is also focused on ensuring equity of access to health services and equity of health outcomes.
To inform the development of the guidance we are keen to learn from services that are implementing making every contact count into contracts, teams or individuals. And scope what existing activity there is for ensuring the workforce has the skills to talk to service user about their health and wellbeing, this may be via training programmes or service redesign.
Draft guidance will be developed by 31 March 2011 and opportunities for the East Midlands health workforce to test out the guidance will be made available to inform the evaluation of the project.
The project has identified 5 core work streams which are:
1. Making the case
There are a plethora of documents and theories available on behaviour change. The Hub commissioned the Central Office for Information to produce a synthesis of the core current documentation driving the making every contact count agenda and highlight any consistent themes or differences. The synthesis can be access here.
The project will also be incorporating the benefits for planners, commissioners and service providers within the guidance as it is developed.
2. Developing the guidance
Draft guidance is now available for comment and will be in draft format until after the pilot phase which will take place June - December 2011.
3. Using the Map of Medicine
Alongside the development of the guidance the project will be undertaking the development of a behaviour change care pathway. It is intended this pathway will be published on the map of medicine. Additional work will also be undertaken to review which elements of the pathway can support and be integral to other care pathways where appropriate. For more information on this please contact Elaine Varley.
4. Establishing a Community of Practice
Please follow this link for information on the community of practice and for details on how to register
5. Evaluating the guidance
Once the guidance is complete 4 or 5 pilot sites will be sought to test out the application of the guidance. It is expected each site will be from a different health and social care related setting.
In the short term, from the sites we will be looking for:
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Feedback on the guidance, its usability and application
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Feedback from staff and teams being responsible to make every contact count
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A report against the checklist and how organisations have implemented the actions they should take, in particular changes to working practices
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Understanding health inequalities and the importance of tailoring a contact with a client according to their need and what might influence their behaviour
Longer term, the outcome of making every contact is difficult to evaluate and will take time for the extent of the impact to be known i.e. cost savings to an organisations, overall improvement in community or population health and wellbeing. The guidance will begin to explore the systems required to monitor progress and outcomes.
