Changing lives through evidence-based health content

How has your background shaped your work?

At school I was interested in how people think and communicate, so I went on to do a psychology degree. I was particularly drawn to health psychology because it focuses on very practical, behavioural things. I was fascinated by how people experience long-term conditions differently and how thoughts and feelings about health conditions can affect how people cope and, to an extent, their health outcomes.

After my degree, I did an MSc in health psychology and trained to become a registered health psychologist. This involved research, teaching, and working directly with patients, helping them manage conditions like chronic pain, cancer and insomnia.

This hands-on experience really brought home the importance of understanding people’s experiences and how they navigate their health journeys.

How did you get into developing health interventions?

While I was still training, I worked as a Research Associate and then Research Fellow, before taking my current role. My research focuses on any condition or injury that affects how somebody looks – from limb loss to scarring or eczema. These have a major impact on self-esteem.

My team designs interventions to help people manage the psychological impacts of looking different, navigate the societal pressures and address the functional aspects of their condition. I do this using interventions like guides, courses and step-by-step processes to follow, which we test carefully.

What is the most important principle in your work?

Inclusion. When you’re developing resources, it’s crucial to involve people with lived experience throughout the entire process. We need to remember that we, as researchers or professionals, aren’t experts in living with these conditions – patients are.

When we’re developing resources, we use person-based approaches as much as possible. We do research with people to look at what their concerns are and what psychological techniques might help. We start with a group of advisors, including

health professionals, charities and people with lived experience, and they work together to inform the aims of the intervention, how we’ll collect data, user testing, and the development of the resource itself.

Then we might do a randomised control trial, where we test the intervention compared to a group of people who are doing something else.

Another principle is using clear and accessible language, avoiding jargon and medical terms that might not be clear or resonate with people. This decreases the power imbalance between patients, health professionals and researchers and makes communication by professionals more useful for patients.

Also, it’s so important to work with experts in design when creating resources. It’s obviously key to have the actual content of the intervention itself, but that’s only a small part of making a successful resource that reaches and supports people effectively.

What trends are you seeing in health communication?

Social media is playing an ever-growing role in health communication now. It’s a great way to share information and connect with others, but it’s really hard to discern what information’s reliable. You see lots of things being branded as ‘cures’ for long-term conditions that are actually uncurable, often from people wanting to sell a product.

Connection to others with lived experience can be just as important as medical information, but social media is also changing people’s expectations and increasingly making people move away from engaging with healthcare, which is quite worrying.

What are the biggest misconceptions you see in your work?

One is the idea that simply giving people information will lead to behaviour change. Often, people don’t lack health knowledge – it’s more around people’s motivations and intentions to change their behaviours, which are greatly impacted by factors like social norms.

Another is that professionals tend to think they already understand people’s experiences and what will help them. But when we do the research, the results are actually quite different. Many organisations don’t have the funding to do thorough research before creating a resource – but accessing that funding is really important to make sure what we create is not only useful but doesn’t cause harm.

What’s on the horizon for you?

We’re working on lots of interventions, including several alongside the VTCT Foundation for visible differences. One of my colleagues has developed an app, using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, to improve the quality of life for people with visible differences.

We’re also developing guidelines on using social media effectively for positive health information and support. We hear a lot of negatives but social media can be an amazing tool, so we need to understand how we harness the benefits.

1. Remember, everyone’s experience is unique. Even if people have similar conditions, tailor your communications to people’s specific experiences.

2. Empower patients. When you’re developing a resource, be clear about who it’s for and your guiding principles. For example, focus on empowering patients first, before any wider benefits for professionals.

3. Use free validated scales and measures to assess the impact of your resources, such as the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the suite of short measures at the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS).