Full Day Workshops

EHPS 2024 will accommodate five (5) Full Day workshops, which will be held on Tuesday 3rd of September 2024. Conference attendees who wish to participate in these workshops will be required to register and pay the appropriate fee. Details on the workshop registration process can be found at https://2024.ehps.net/registration. Please note that the Full Day workshops, as well as the Half Day workshops will be held in parallel. So you can register to participate in just one workshop, Half or Full Day.

Participatory Research Methods for Health psychology: A crash course with coaching and collective learning.

Implementing communications training to support healthcare professionals in addressing vaccine hesitancy

Putting a good idea into practice: Using the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology

An introduction to the multiphase optimisation strategy (MOST) and optimisation trials

How users can help improve your health interventions: a workshop on co-creation theory and methods

Participatory Research Methods for Health psychology: A crash course with coaching and collective learning.

Description:

This workshop aims to equip health psychology researchers and practitioners with knowledge necessary for engaging in participatory research (PR) methodologies in their work.

PR describes methods that actively involve individuals with relevant lived experience within the research process. It involves collaboration between researchers and community members, recognising the value of non-academic expertise.

PR aligns with ethical and justice-focused principles, and can also produce more impactful research findings and interventions, with greater influence on policymaker decisions. However, guidance in health psychology differs across countries and contexts, and PR brings unique challenges and considerations to navigate.

Using recent, concrete examples of PR, attendees will explore PR’s theoretical underpinnings, learning how to systematically integrate principles and frameworks into their research. Attendees will be encouraged to bring examples from their own work, to be used in discussions and problem-solving sessions.

Objectives:

Participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of PR theory and principles and their application in health psychology.

Participants will leave feeling more confident and equipped to conduct PR.

Participants will have opportunities for mutual learning and for developing connections to support their work.

Participants will leave with tools and learning directly relevant to their work.

Activities:

The workshop will begin with presentations of the latest theories and principles followed by case-studies from the facilitators, who have experience in PR and coaching others in participatory methods. Much of the workshop will be spent in facilitated collaborative learning activities, where participants will have the opportunity to

troubleshoot their own participatory research cases
identify common challenges and concerns
share existing tools, techniques and strategies
gain feedback on research ideas, plans and proposals.

Participants:

Up to 16 health psychology researchers/practitioners with a basic understanding, and appreciation, of PR methods, who intend to conduct, or are already conducting, PR.

Maximum number of participants:

16

Offered for online participation:

No

Program:

8:30 – Arrival and registration
9:00 – Welcome and introduction followed by presentations [1hr30]
10:30 – Refreshments Break [20mins]
10:50 – Interactive session 1 [1hr30]
12:20 – Lunch break [1hr]
13:20 – Interactive session 2 [1hr30]
14:50 – Refreshments Break [20mins]
15:10 – Collecting learnings [1hr30]
16:50 – Stretch and wrap up [20mins]
17:00 – Workshop end

Convenors and Facilitators:

Emily Hillison, Independent Researcher and Author, United Kingdom
With a career history as colourful as her hair, Emily has experience from academia, the tech industry, the charity sector, the sports industry, government bodies, and healthcare. She works to make health research more accessible for underserved communities, particularly service users in mental health contexts, where she uses her own lived experience of mental health difficulties and works reflexively to facilitate and campaign for greater involvement and equity in research. She regularly provides training and support in participatory research to experts by experience, academics and professionals, and works to bridge the gap between grassroots approaches and traditional forms of research. Within health psychology, her main passion and experience is in physical activity promotion, though she has been known to stray into other areas if given the chance.

Facilitators:

Lauren Gatting, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Lauren works as a behavioural scientist, applying health psychology to her healthcare communication and acceptability research. Her interest in participatory research began during her PhD in which she used these approaches for the development of engaging, assessable, informative and equitable communication about cancer screening. She continues to apply participatory approaches within her work and is keen to continue discovering what participatory methods are best to use when, for what purpose and with whom.

Implementing communications training to support healthcare professionals in addressing vaccine hesitancy

Description:

Tailored solutions are urgently needed to tackle falling vaccination rates that threaten many immunisation programmes. Healthcare professionals (HCPs) play an important role in offering tailored vaccine communication, with patients often citing HCPs as a trusted source of vaccine information and counsel. However, many HCPs feel under-prepared to engage in these conversations, especially when vaccine discourse is hampered by misinformation that requires psychological skills to refute. This workshop will address solutions for preparing HCPs for vaccine conversations, under the conference track “communication with health professionals” and the UN sustainable goal of achieving “vaccines for all”.

The workshop will be facilitated by the JITSUVAX team, whose research found that HCPs desire training on how to dispel patients’ vaccine misconceptions while maintaining patient-provider relationships. We also found that a communication approach demonstrating empathy and alignment with patients’ psychological motivations for vaccine hesitancy achieves this better than a factual approach. However, converting research into practical training requires good contextual knowledge of national, regional, and local health systems and co-ordination with practitioners and health authorities. We aim to harness participants’ expertise and experiences from different health systems to co-create training implementation solutions.

Activities and Objectives:

The workshop will:

Introduce the “Empathetic Refutational Interview” framework to guide vaccine conversations, which was developed in JITSUVAX’s research and is supported by educational tools in five different European languages. Objective: To use this framework as a springboard to discuss evidence-based approaches for tailored patient-provider vaccine conversations.
Demonstrate interactive and practical exercises for building HCPs’ confidence and competence with vaccine conversations. Objective: To experience how research interventions are converted to practical training.
Work with participants to develop customised vaccine communications training suitable for their health system contexts. Objective: To co-create training implementation solutions.

Intended participants (maximum 25):

Practitioners and academics with interests in immunisation and health communication.

Convenors:

Dawn Holford, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Frederike Taubert, Universität Erfurt, Germany

Facilitators:

Linda Karlsson, University of Turku, Finland

Virginia Gould, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Expertise statement:

All convenors and facilitators are members of JITSUVAX, an EU-funded project that develops tools and training to support healthcare professionals in tackling vaccine misconceptions and address vaccine hesitancy. All of the team were involved in the development of the project’s “Empathetic Refutational Interview” training programme for healthcare professionals and have delivered this evidence-based training in trials in Germany and the UK. The research underpinning this training programme was led by the convenors.

Putting a good idea into practice: Using the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology

Rationale:

Advancing knowledge in health psychology can be hugely accelerated by more efficient organisation, accumulation, sharing and integration of knowledge. Ontologies enable more precise reporting, thereby improving intra- and interdisciplinary communication, replication of findings, evidence synthesis and theory development. After 6 years of development led by Susan Michie, 2024 sees the completion of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO) and tools for accessing, searching and visualising it.

Objectives:

This workshop aims to educate and train participants to apply the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO) in research. To achieve this, the workshop will address:
The scope and structure of the BCIO, including its component ontologies
How to navigate the BCIO’s online, publicly available tools
How to use the BCIO in evidence synthesis (e.g., annotating in systematic reviews)
How to use the BCIO to support intervention design and intervention description

Activities:

This workshop will present the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO), a method of representing knowledge that enable precise description, interdisciplinary and cross-domain communication and sophisticated data analysis. It will focus on four of its component ontologies: the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology (BCTO), the Style of Delivery Ontology (SDO), the Human Behaviour Ontology (HBO), and the Mechanisms of Action Ontology (MAO).

The workshop will demonstrate and encourage hands-on practice of how to navigate the component ontologies, explore their content, and identify specific entities of interest. This will be in the context of research uses of the ontology e.g. for annotating research reports, synthesising evidence, designing interventions, writing research protocols and reports, and identifying research gaps.

Intended participants:

Anyone interested in systematic intervention reporting, evidence synthesis, and/or intervention design using the BCIO.

Maximum number of participants:

30

Convenors and Facilitators:

Paulina Schenk, University College London, United Kingdom

Dr Schenk has worked on ontologies in health psychology, including parts of the BCIO, for the last six years. Her work included leading the development of the Mechanism of Action and Human Behaviour Ontology as part of the BCIO. One of her key interests are supporting the usability of the BCIO, on which she and Lisa have previously provided training and are currently conducting a study to make BCIO tools more usable.
Lisa Zhang, University College London, United Kingdom
Ms Zhang has been a key member of the Human Behaviour-Change Project over the last 2 years, leading and supporting the development of various parts of the BCIO. She has helped finalise the Behaviour Change Techniques Ontology and led the development of the Style of Delivery Ontology. Lisa is also working enhancing the usability of the BCIO for a wide range of use cases and audiences (e.g., by supporting a user group).

Facilitators:

Marie Johnston, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom

Prof Johnston is co-investigator of the Human Behaviour-Change Project and a key developer of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO). She conducts research on behaviour and behaviour change in the context of health, illness and healthcare with an emphasis on improving measurement, research design and reporting and developing implementable behaviour change interventions based on evidence and theory. She has over 500 publications and her research has been supported by research council, government and charitable sources.

An introduction to the multiphase optimisation strategy (MOST) and optimisation trials

Objectives:

After attending the workshop, we aim for participants to be able to:

Identify the three stages of MOST (preparation, optimisation, evaluation) and be able to describe its key advantages;

Describe options for experimental designs that can be used to optimise complex interventions;
Explain relevant methodological/trial conduct challenges and potential solutions.
Have an opportunity to network with health psychology researchers interested in MOST

Activities:

The Multiphase Optimisation Strategy (MOST) is an engineering-inspired framework for preparing, optimising, and evaluating complex interventions. MOST advocates for the use of highly efficient experimental designs to refine intervention packages, with the aim of producing more effective, affordable, scalable and efficient complex interventions. Its use is growing among health psychology researchers, particularly in the US where the framework was founded. Dedicated training programmes are required to encourage more intervention scientists to use MOST, in anticipation that this will move the field of health psychology forward at a faster pace.

Using formal presentations, small group work, feedback, and large group discussion, we will use our experience and training in MOST to provide an introduction to its three phases. We will provide an overview of the range of experimental designs suitable for optimising different types of intervention. We will have a particular focus on designs within the family of factorial trials, including full factorials, fractional factorials, and sequential multiple assignment randomised trials (SMARTs), while also considering other possible designs (e.g. micro-randomised trials and hybrid experimental designs).

This workshop aligns closely with the following tracks: methodology, interventions in disease, health behaviour change interventions, and implementation & health services research.

Description of the intended participants:

Participants should have an interest in designing and evaluating complex interventions within randomised trials. Attendees should have received basic training in statistics (e.g. regression) to gain maximum benefit.

Maximum participants:

40

Convenors and Facilitators:

Samuel Smith, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Samuel Smith is Professor of Behavioural Oncology with an interest and strong track record in the development of complex interventions. He has received extensive training in MOST and associated experimental designs. He is the Chief Investigator of the UK NIHR-funded ROSETA optimisation trial, which uses the MOST framework. He has delivered several educational workshops on MOST and optimisation trials.

Angela Pfammatter, The University of Tennessee, USA

Angela Pfammatter is the Senior Methodologist for the College of Education, Health, and Human Science and Associate Professor of Public Health at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Associate Adjunct Professor of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She is internationally recognized as an expert in optimization trial designs and behavioral intervention development. She has published widely in the field of optimization, and has a strong track record of collaborative funding to support this work.

How users can help improve your health interventions: a workshop on co-creation theory and methods

Background:

It is a human right to have a voice in how you’re treated with regards to your health. However, people must often endure what healthcare professionals or eHealth technology say is best for them. From a user perspective it is therefore not surprising that adoption and perseverance in health interventions is often low. Health psychologists, -organizations, and -funders recognize the need for user involvement, but a systematic overview and guidelines of co-creation methods is still lacking. As a result, user interests are often not optimally integrated in intervention development. The domain of human-centered design offers a range of co-creation methods that involve end-users in designing health interventions. These methods help to warrant the human right of participation, increase experienced ownership of interventions, lead to more creative solutions, and result in better tailored interventions.

How can we release this potential of co-creation to make better user-aligned health interventions? In this workshop we provide you with an overview of theory, methods, and experiences of co-creation and will co-create, together with you, a systemic approach for co-creating health interventions.

Objectives:

Provide overview of co-creation theory and methods

Clarify definitions of key terms
Apply co-creation methods to cases of participants
Collectively write a draft position paper about co-creation in practice

Activities:

Before:

Participants bring a retrospective case in which they applied co-creation and a prospective case in which they can apply co-creation

During:

Presentation on theory, methods, and definitions
Discussion on participant experiences
Subgroups apply co-creation to generic case
Individuals apply co-creation to a specific case from their own projects
Group discussion on obstacles and opportunities in practice
Draft position paper
After:
Co-author position paper

Intended participants:

Health psychologists and intervention designers

Maximum number of participants:

21

Convenors and Facilitators:

Niko Vegt, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Rotterdam & TU Delft, Industrial Design Engineering, Delft, the Netherlands

Niko Vegt holds a PhD in serious games and gamification and has co-creatively developed eHealth applications in the domains of neurology, obesity, and pediatrics. In his current postdoc positions at Erasmus University and TU Delft he works on the intersection of social sciences and design practice, investigating and developing co-creation methodology for teenagers in the PROTECt ME network and Child! What would you do? project.

David de Buisonje, TU Delft, Industrial Design Engineering, Delft & Leiden University, Health, Medical and Neuropsychology, Leiden, the Netherlands

David de Buisonjé has worked in health intervention development and research from a business, policy, and science perspective. In his postdoc at the department of Human Centered Design at TU Delft, David studies how to facilitate sustainable health behavior change through involving users in the design of digital products.

Facilitators:

Valentijn Visch, Delft University of Technology, Industrial Design Engineering, Netherlands

Valentijn Visch is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. He coordinates the Design for Health Motivation research group, is research representative for the Human Centered Design department, chairs the IDE eHealth research lab and is involved as researcher/project leader in several health-related transdisciplinary research projects including subjects like health for people in vulnerable positions, motivational health data interactions, and health ownership.