Abstract
Background
Healthcare professionals in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) are encouraged to deliver health behaviour change interventions during routine consultations. ‘If-then’ planning helps healthcare professionals to work with patients to identify and overcome barriers. However, in order to deploy such interventions, healthcare professionals must find them acceptable.
Aims
To use the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability (TFA) to understand the acceptability of interventions to support delivery of if-then planning interventions by: (a) exploring healthcare professionals’ experiences of an online theory-based intervention which was designed to support them to deliver opportunistic health behaviour change interventions during routine clinical consultations, and (b) understanding the most prominent aspects of intervention acceptability to make recommendations for refinements and implementation.
Method
Twenty-six NHS healthcare professionals (including nurses, physiotherapists, dieticians, doctors and midwives) participated in semi-structured interviews. The TFA informed both the design of the interview topic guide and the framework analysis, in which findings were mapped onto the TFA domains.
Results
Five TFA domains were prominent: affective attitude, burden, intervention coherence, perceived effectiveness, and ethicality. There were mixed attitudes, but HCPs were broadly positive (affective attitude), valued the brief format (burden), and felt it aligned with their professional values (ethicality). They understood the intervention (intervention coherence) and believed it addressed barriers to health behaviour change conversations (perceived effectiveness).
Conclusions
The intervention was broadly acceptable to healthcare professionals, with key domains including affective attitude, burden, intervention coherence, perceived effectiveness and ethicality identified as important. These findings provide specific targets for refining the intervention and supporting its implementation in routine healthcare practice.