Behavioural and Implementation Science

Changing behaviour and implementing best practice to promote health

Behaviour change is key to improving population health and health service delivery.

Our group focuses on addressing two key problems at the national and international level:

Key behavioural risk factors undermine health and wellbeing. For example, four behaviours alone (smoking, physical inactivity, poor diet and excessive alcohol consumption) contribute to around one-third of the total burden of disease in the UK and over one-fifth worldwide. Changing these behaviours would add an average of 14 years to an individual’s life expectancy
The failure to implement evidence-based interventions in practice and policy: Only half of evidence-based interventions and practices are routinely implemented into healthcare settings and wasted effort in medical research is estimated to be around 85%.

We have unique strengths in methods of developing, evaluating and understanding the implementation of behaviour change interventions, particularly for scalable interventions targeting the ‘big five’ behaviours; smoking, physical activity, diet, excessive alcohol consumption, and medication taking.

For more information contact Wendy Hardeman.
W.Hardeman@uea.ac.uk