BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health Assessment Guidelines: Intervention Challenge January 2024 This guidance document has been produced by Jake Sallaway-Costello for students enrolled on BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health in the academic year commencing October 2023. Academic staff will always endeavour to maintain module planning throughout an academic year. Circumstances beyond their control may, however, require minor changes to be made to module plans. Such changes will be communicated to students in a timely manner, and students will be provided with an updated version of this document. The details described in this guide are only relevant to academic year 2023/24. BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health Assessment Guidance: Intervention Challenge Assessment Guidelines: Intervention Challenge January 2024 The summative assessment for this module challenges you to apply insights from health psychology and health sociology to the design and development of a health promotion intervention. Replicating public health tendering practices in the real world, you will form a multi-professional team to persuade a Grant Panel to give you public funding of up to £20,000 to deliver a health promotion intervention, addressing a public health nutrition issue of your choice. As a group, you will use an appropriate health needs assessments to identify a health threat which meets the requirements of a Funding Brief. You will design an innovative, evidence-based, theoretically-informed intervention to address that challenge. After presenting your proposed intervention as a group, you will receive feedback and further develop your intervention individually, to be submitted as a final written tender report. This is an authentic assessment, designed with practitioners, to give you a genuine experience of public health work. To succeed in this assessment, you will need to: • • • • • Identify a public health nutrition challenge and the health needs of populations. Apply psychological and/or sociological theory to dietary health promotion. Design an evidence-based intervention to achieve improved health outcomes. Evaluate health promotion activity in nutrition and dietetic practice. Communicate public health nutrition needs and interventions to a lay audience. This assessment is worth 100% of the module grade J Sallaway-Costello | School of Biosciences BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health Assessment Guidance: Intervention Challenge Intervention Challenge This assessment has two separate elements. You should read this guidance carefully so you understand what is expected of you, and note important details such as the submission deadline, word limit, expected content and other information. You should: Form a group and identify a public health nutrition issue, based upon the criteria set out in the Funding Brief document As a group, design a health promotion intervention to address your chosen issue, employing sound use of social scientific theory Create and submit a poster on your intervention by Receive feedback on your intervention from the Grant Panel: use their recommendations to develop your intervention individually As an individual, write up your final intervention as a tender report, and submit it The word limit is 750 words for the group poster, and 1500 words for the individual tender report. J Sallaway-Costello | School of Biosciences BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health Assessment Guidance: Intervention Challenge FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 1. What public health nutrition challenge can we address? In January 2024, the Grant Panel released a Funding Brief by email, inviting you to form a group to design a health promotion intervention. The Funding Brief outlines the exact criteria for appropriate tenders, including the types of public health nutrition challenges the Grant Panel seek to use their funding to address. It is important that you examine this document carefully and comply with the requirements it describes. The Funding Brief does not explicitly state any specific examples of interventions the Panel wishes to fund, and does not provide a list of possible issues they seek to address. You should read the Funding Brief carefully with your group, to ensure you understand which interventions the Grant Panel will, and will not, fund in this round. You should start your assessment efforts by consulting a health needs assessment to identify a suitable public health nutrition issue. 2. What can we do for the intervention proposal? This assessment requires you to take a social scientific approach to the exploration, analysis, and confrontation of public health nutrition issues, through the professional practice of health promotion. All proposals must be evidence-based, theoretically informed, and must employ suitable evaluation and impact measures. Examples of interventions groups have designed and presented in previous years have included: • • • Safer Spaces: promoting cardioprotective measures using the activated health model for improved heart health in the transgender community in Nottingham. Freshers Eat Fresh: employing novel positive reinforcements to increase fruit and vegetable consumption in university students in Nottinghamshire. Incredible Edibles: developing a food waste delivery service to build food secure communities in rural Derbyshire using Citizen Participation. Make Whey For Health: increasing protein intake of elderly people living in care homes in Beeston through facilitating gravitation towards self-actualisation. It is very important that you appreciate the professional approach this assessment requires. Amateur, lay attempts to improve health (i.e., telling people what to eat, raising awareness, educating the public, sharing recipes, social media campaigns, etc) are not appropriate for this level of study or professional practice, and may prevent your work from being awarded a pass grade. Your intervention must be theoretically informed: this does not mean it must make use of every social and behavioural theory taught on this module, but rather that you should carefully identify an appropriate theoretical approach, and skilfully apply it to a real public health nutrition challenge. J Sallaway-Costello | School of Biosciences BIOS3043 - Changing Behaviour, Promoting Health Assessment Guidance: Intervention Challenge 3. Do you have any advice on what makes a good intervention? Health promotion is a complex and highly inexact applied science: designing an impactful intervention is a challenging skill. Students in previous cohorts have voiced both their enjoyment of working on this task, and their surprise regarding the nuanced and complicated practice of public health. It is very easy to differentiate between strong and poor interventions. For the first task, the Poster Presentation, former students have suggested that you... • • · Form a group quickly and meet with your group regularly. Designing a robust intervention will take longer than you initially think, and you will fast run out of time to develop the intervention and create the poster if you procrastinate. Make progress each week and don't fall behind. As in the real world where work cannot stop just because someone is on holiday, if someone in your group cannot attend a meeting, hold the meeting anyway and proceed without them. Find a reasonable balance between being ambitious and being realistic. The £20,000 funding available can have considerable and long-lasting impact in local communities, but it will not stretch to city-wide or regional initiatives. For the second task, the Tender Report, former students have suggested that you... Act upon every piece of feedback provided. The Grant Panel will not suggest changes to the intervention without cause, so you should take all of their recommendations seriously when developing the intervention for your report. Communicate professional confidence. Making modest use of professional titles and post-nominals, developing a brand image for your tender, and using appropriate language will give the Grant Panel confidence in your work. • • • Focus on quality rather than quantity. Simply writing "more" or giving more detail will not improve the quality of your report. Instead, pay attention to the use of theory, practice frameworks, health needs assessments, and impact measures. 4. Do you have any advice on what to avoid? Reflecting on characteristics of interventions in previous years which have not been so successful, and required significant development, you are advised to avoid... • • • • Deciding on a public health nutrition issue randomly, or based purely on personal interests, without consulting an appropriate health needs assessment. Designing the intervention "backwards", such as coming up with an idea about what the intervention will be, and then attempting to find theory to support it. Proposing use of clinical methods in non-clinical applications, which is a sure way of guaranteeing the Grant Panel will reject your intervention. Requesting funding for an intervention which embodies methods or ideas the Funding Brief explicitly states the Grant Panel will not consider. J Sallaway-Costello | School of Biosciences