Promoting professional behaviour change in healthcare: what interventions work, and why?

Hot on the tail of news about our London meeting on November 18 to launch the NoMAD instrument to measure implementation using Normalization Process Theory, comes the publication of our overview of systematic reviews of professional behaviour change interventions in healthcare.
 
An important question is why there are so many negative trials of behaviour change interventions that link beliefs and attitudes with intentions. We often see that these intentions are not translated into behaviour change, or that if they are, behaviour changes are temporary. This seems to be true across a range of important translational problems – from operationalizing guidelines and care plans through to implementing telemedicine systems.
 
Mark Johnson and I looked at 67 systematic reviews of professional behaviour change interventions and coded them against the constructs of NPT. We showed that interventions that are successful are more likely to be include a greater spread of the activities defined by Normalization Process Theory. In particular, our overview suggests that collective action and reflexive monitoring components are crucial to successful behaviour change interventions.
 
Read our overview of systematic reviews of health professional behaviour change interventions here.