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