Everyday Interactions: A Refresh, provides an update of the resources developed in 2017 by RSPH and Public Health England (PHE), following an evaluation throughout 2019.
The Everyday Interactions toolkit provides clear and concise guidance for health and care professionals wishing to record and measure their public health impact based on a Making Every Contact Count (MECC) framework.
Included in the toolkit are 11 impact pathways professionals based on key public health priorities, including childhood obesity, mental wellbeing, smoking and dementia. In addition, a new generic pathway has been developed and can be used to combine pathways or to add in public health priorities not covered by the 11 separate pathways.
The updated report includes an evaluation of the toolkit, comprising a number of case studies, findings from qualitative interviews and a survey of healthcare professionals.
The survey found that:
- Over three in four professionals (76%) stated that the impact pathways provided them with an opportunity to reflect on the practice and delivery of healthy conversations.
- Over half said that the pathways made it easier to record brief interventions/healthy conversations (61%) and to more routinely record healthy conversations (56%).
The report also contains economic modeling of the benefits of using MECC in routine clinical practice.
RSPH are calling for:
- Healthcare leaders to incorporate Everyday Interactions into thinking at system level
- Everyday Interactions to be used as a means of linking into social prescribing
- Commissioners to include Everyday Interactions in service-level agreements
- RSPH, PHE and other stakeholders to increase their communications around Everyday Interactions
Shirley Cramer, Chief Executive of RSPH, said: “We are pleased to launch this refreshed toolkit in collaboration with Public Health England. By focusing on the public health impact of a broad range of healthcare professions - from nurses and midwives, to dentists, allied health professionals and pharmacists – this toolkit equips and supports professionals to engage with patients in order to support them to live healthier lives, and vitally, find out what matters to them.”
Linda Hindle, Public Health England’s Lead Allied Health Professional, said: “This toolkit was developed in response to requests from health and care professionals who wanted to understand the impact of their routine healthy conversations on the public’s health. Those who use the resources find them to be valuable, we now need to spread the word to encourage wider awareness and uptake of this toolkit.”
Viv Bennett, Public Health England’s Chief Nurse, said: “We are delighted to embed the impact pathways from this refreshed toolkit into PHE’s All Our Health Framework. Together they support health and care professionals to engage in and measure the impact of interventions to improve health and wellbeing.”
Gul Root, Public Health England’s Lead Public Health Pharmacist, said: “The Everyday Interactions toolkit refreshed by the Royal Society for Public Health is a great way of providing pharmacy teams with a tool to record and measure the impact of their public health interventions in a systematic way. This information will help to build the evidence for the contribution pharmacy teams make to improving the health of people in this country as well as provide assurance to commissioners to influence their commissioning decisions.”
Helen Donovan, Professional Lead for Public Health Nursing at the Royal College of Nursing, said: “I really welcome the resource which is designed to support nurses and all health care professionals record measure and monitor those everyday contacts which support people to adopt healthier lifestyles or support early recognition and intervention. Using the tools can help ensure these actions are valued and resources properly targeted to where they are needed to improve the public’s health and wellbeing. The resource is not a replacement for investment in the nursing workforce that is needed to deliver the support some patients need to live healthier lives.”
