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Supervisors:

• Dr Ash Routen ar516@leicester.ac.uk
• Dr Riya Patel
• Dr Patrick Highton

Project Description:

Lifestyle interventions are a central component of contemporary public health strategies. Evidence suggests that programmes promoting physical activity, healthy eating, behaviour change and social support can improve health outcomes, reduce risk factors for chronic disease and enhance mental wellbeing. Community-based interventions are particularly important because they can reach populations who may have limited engagement with traditional healthcare services. Research indicates that interventions delivered in familiar and trusted community settings can improve participation, increase acceptability and reduce barriers to access, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups who experience a disproportionate burden of preventable disease.

The Healthy Goals programme represents an example of this preventative approach. It is a 12-week manualised culturally tailored programme that combines physical activity, mental wellbeing support, nutrition support and community engagement to support ethnic minority communities to make lifestyle changes important for the prevention of long-term conditions.  

This PhD is situated in a larger programme of work. The Healthy Goals programme has yet to be formally evaluated, but preliminary data suggests the programme is effective and acceptable to the communities it has been delivered to. It is also important to explore scalability and sustainability with community-based interventions as despite many interventions showing initial promise there are still unresolved issues around ongoing participant engagement, securing ongoing funding, as well as preserving effectiveness when delivered across different settings and populations. 

Therefore, the primary aim of this PhD is to not only investigate whether the Healthy goals programme works, but also how it can be embedded within communities and health systems over time.
By investigating programme efficacy alongside issues of implementation, scalability and sustainability, this research can generate evidence relevant to policymakers, commissioners and practitioners seeking to reduce health inequalities and improve population health through community-led prevention strategies.

Year 1&2: A feasibility RCT of the Healthy Goals intervention with embedded process evaluation
Year 3: A multi-stakeholder qualitative study exploring implementation and sustainability of the Healthy Goals programme. 

References:

Wilson, H. K., Wieler, C., Bell, D. L., Bhattarai, A. P., Castillo-Hernandez, I. M., Williams, E. R., ... & Berg, A. C. (2024). Implementation of the diabetes prevention program in georgia cooperative extension according to RE-AIM and the consolidated framework for implementation research. Prevention Science, 25(Suppl 1), 34-45.

Heerman, W. J., Schludnt, D., Harris, D., Teeters, L., Apple, R., & Barkin, S. L. (2018). Scale-out of a community-based behavioral intervention for childhood obesity: pilot implementation evaluation. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 498.

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