Innovative Health and Complex Interventions

Lead: Professor Katie Haighton

Innovative Health and Complex Interventions includes the following research areas:

• Design digital, social and community interventions to improve health and wellbeing
• Improvement of patient safety through education and practice
• Inform behaviour change interventions to facilitate healthy lifestyle behaviours and ill health prevention.
• Explore the role of social media in promoting (un)healthy behaviours and media campaigns in driving public health campaigns such as cervical screening, vaccine uptake, organ, egg and sperm donations. This includes work on misinformation and health conspiracy theory
• Improve self management of chronic, long term and stigmatising conditions through data gathering and sharing
• Optimise efficiency of interventions via health economic analysis

This research area aims to improve mental and physical health, and quality of care via psychological, social, technological and workforce interventions. It spans individual, local community level and media-based interventions. Our interests cover many different health behaviours including sleep, stress, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual health and the management of long term chronic, and stigmatising health conditions. We focus on understanding, facilitating and maintaining health behaviour change. At a community level, we have a particular focus on tools and technologies, and workforce innovations. At a social level, we are particularly interested in the influence of social media and communication strategies around health behaviour, including understanding the factors that influence people into sharing and believing health conspiracy theories and misinformation and what sort of interventions might counteract this influence. From a technological perspective we are exploring how to integrate the substantial data relating to health behaviours, which can now be gathered by people, into intelligent interventions of the future and future medical consultations.

The research will draw from theories and methods from psychology, design and economics; driving the development and evaluation of real-world interventions, often supported through technology.