Does the design of the NHS Low‐Calorie Diet Programme have fidelity to the programme specification? A documentary review of service parameters and behaviour change content in a type 2 diabetes intervention

Background: NHS England commissioned four independent service providers to pilot low‐calorie diet programmes to drive weight loss, improve glycaemia and potentially achieve remission of Type 2 Diabetes across 10 localities. Intervention fidelity might contribute to programme success. Previous research has illustrated a drift in fidelity in the design and delivery of other national diabetes programmes. Aims: (1) To describe and compare the programme designs across the four service providers; (2) To assess the fidelity of programme designs to the NHS England service specification. Methods: The NHS England service specification documents and each provider's programme design documents were double‐coded for key intervention content using the Template for Intervention Description and Replication Framework and the Behaviour Change Technique (BCT) Taxonomy. Results: The four providers demonstrated fidelity to most but not all of the service parameters stipulated in the NHS England service specification. Providers included between 74% and 87% of the 23 BCTs identified in the NHS specification. Twelve of these BCTs were included by all four providers; two BCTs were consistently absent. An additional seven to 24 BCTs were included across providers. Conclusions: A loss of fidelity for some service parameters and BCTs was identified across the provider's designs; this may have important consequences for programme delivery and thus programme outcomes. Furthermore, there was a large degree of variation between providers in the presence and dosage of additional BCTs. How these findings relate to the fidelity of programme delivery and variation in programme outcomes and experiences across providers will be examined

Working with stakeholders to translate health psychology research into practice: reflections from evaluations of two national behaviour change programmes

This article reports the reflections of a Research Associate (Rhiannon Hawkes) and PhD student/Trainee Health Psychologist (Tamla Evans) working on the multidisciplinary evaluations of two distinct but similar nationally implemented behaviour change programmes: the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NHS-DPP) and the NHS England Low Calorie Diet Programme (NHS-LCD). The two of us met in early 2021 as part of multiple shared learnings meetings between our two independent research teams at the University of Manchester (DIPLOMA evaluation) and Leeds Beckett University (Re:Mission evaluation). Due to our aligned research interests we continued to meet independently to share insights and learnings from the research process with one another, leading to the co-authorship of two journal publications. This article shares insights into successfully working with programme stakeholders to facilitate these independent evaluations and ensuring research findings are translated into policy and practice. We hope our experiences demonstrate how collaborating with researchers on similar projects facilitates impactful research, as achieved by the DIPLOMA and Re:Mission project teams. We also reflect on the value of health psychology expertise in these programmes, and the opportunities for heath psychologists to be involved in the implementation of large-scale behaviour change programmes