Week 1 interventions live

• Psychological intervention

  Any action intended to interfere with and stop or modify a process, as in treatment undertaken to halt, manage, or alter the course of the pathological process of a disease or disorder
• Psychological intervention(therapist)

  Action on the part of a psychotherapist to deal with the issues and problems of a client. The selection of the intervention is guided by the nature of the problem, the orientation of the therapist, the setting, and the willingness and ability of the client to proceed with the treatment
• Psychological intervention

  In research design, an experimental manipulation
• The point of an intervention is to produce change - attempting to solve a problem
• Theory can be used to help decide what factors are most important to focus on to help solve the problem
• Interventions need to be evaluated to see whether they produce the expected change
• Why is theory important?

  • Gives us a basis for how a process occurs (e.g. how a condition might develop) - follows that we can potentially use this to stop the condition or problem occurring
  • Helps us identify key variables which might be important to target during an intervention, to help patient improvement
• Example of a public health intervention

  • Change4Life
• Change4Life

  Encourage people to be more active, and eat and drink more healthily (education and advice; including of calorie information on menus; food packaging labelling systems)
• Obesity-related health problems cost the NHS >£5billion every year
• 61% of adults and 28% of children were obese
• Overweight and obesity is associated with a higher risk of Type II diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers
• It is actually quite hard to find evidence to support the Change4Life intervention, but it is still being rolled out today
• Advantages of public health campaigns

  • Can inspire change
  • Can reach a wide range of people
  • Can provide education
  • Can lead to societal change
  • Easy to access
  • Raises awareness
  • Cost-effective
• Disadvantages of public health campaigns

  • Difficult to measure effectiveness
  • May not work equally for all people in the population - too wide a target
  • Resource intensive
  • Expensive
  • Easy to ignore
  • May adversely affect certain subgroups - e.g. people with eating disorders
  • Hard to see what the outcome is - what are they trying to target
  • May be lots of other things that impact on behaviour other than the intervention itself
• Behaviour change more likely with Government regulations and legal requirements
• What motivates people to change behaviour during the Covid-19 pandemic? Knowing more people who have contracted Covid, worry about fines, worry about infecting themselves/others
• Behavioural Activation

  A form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which focuses more directly on the behavioural aspects of a condition, used in the NHS as a way of treating depression, but can be used for other mental and physical health conditions
• Cycle of issues before Behavioural Activation

  • Experience
  • emotional distress
  • avoidance
  • reduced opportunity for positive experiences--
  • problems persist--
  • experience
• Advantages of individual-level interventions

  • More targeted and specialised towards a particular person
  • Can be adapted to help the individual in the best way for them
  • People may feel happier being honest about their problems/motivations in an individual setting
• Disadvantages of individual-level interventions

  • Expensive - therapist costs and more sessions required
  • May have to wait a long time for treatment
  • May not be suitable for people with intellectual disability
  • Clinician-patient interaction may affect outcome
  • Other factors might impact on outcome other than intervention
• To know if Change4Life and Behavioural Activation are effective interventions, we need to measure what they are trying to change over time
• The main aims of Behavioural Activation are positive reinforcement and functional analysis of the patient's problem, while the main aims of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are to alter the expression of depression by correcting negative beliefs, maladaptive information processing and behavioural patterns