Project Area: Health service and technology evaluation
Project Summary
With escalating rates of both chronic disease and mental illness, it is critically important to support people experiencing mental health problems to improve their health-related behaviours, such as smoking, physical activity and healthy eating. The Making Every Contact Count (MECC) programme is a standardised programme delivered nationally in Ireland by the Health Service Executive to train and enable healthcare professionals to use brief behavioural interventions in routine healthcare consultations to support patients in making health behaviour changes. International research indicates that bespoke recommendations are needed to optimise and tailor the delivery of behaviour change interventions within mental health care settings. This PhD builds on the HRB funded Making MECC Work Project (https://www.makingmeccwork.com/).
Project Aim
The aim of this PhD project is to
(1) expand our understanding of the delivery of health behaviour change interventions in mental healthcare settings by surveying and interviewing mental healthcare professionals and service users
and
(2) develop recommendations, using consensus methods, to optimise training and intervention delivery of the national MECC programme within mental health care settings in Ireland.
Ideal Candidate
This PhD project would be ideally suited to a candidate with a background in Psychology, Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology or Mental Healthcare.
Supervisory team:
Prof Molly Byrne (Principal Investigator), School of Psychology at the University of Galway
Dr Oonagh Meade (Co-Supervisor) School of Psychology at the University of Galway
Prof Gary Donohoe (Co-Supervisor), School of Psychology at the University of Galway
This project will be based in the University of Galway
