Evidence-based text messages for people with diabetes

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Developing evidence-based diet and physical activity text messages for people with Type 2 Diabetes

• IRAS ID

  316179

• Contact name

  Y K Bartlett

• Contact email

  kiera.bartlett@manchester.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Manchester

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 9 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  Aim: To assess how acceptable text messages that target diet and physical activity are to people with type 2 diabetes
  What we know:
  • Following diet and physical activity advice helps to reduce the risk of health problems for people with type 2 diabetes
  • Just telling people about a healthy diet, or ideal levels of physical activity may not change what someone does day-to-day.
  • Techniques designed to help people change their behaviour, such as setting goals, can help people act
  • Text messages can be sent to large numbers of people, for a low cost
  • For the best chance of success, the messages must a) be acceptable to the people receiving them and b) use techniques to help people to make changes
  How we’re going to achieve our aim: We worked with people with type 2 diabetes, doctors, nurses, dietitians, and researchers to identify key target behaviours. We found techniques that have helped people change their diet and levels of activity from previous research. We then worked with experts in behaviour change to write text messages that target these key behaviours, using the evidence-based techniques.
  This application covers the next stage of the process. Sixty people with type 2 diabetes will complete a survey to tell us whether they like and understand the messages and how useful they think they would be. Then forty people with type 2 diabetes will receive the messages for up 3 months and take part in an interview to help us understand their experiences. This process will help us learn how acceptable these messages are to people with type 2 diabetes and remove any that are not acceptable. Participants will be recruited from a database of people interested in research and GP surgeries. Funding has been awarded by NIHR Research for Patient Benefit (NIHR202832).

  Summary of study results:

  Our aim:
  To develop text messages to help people with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) improve their diet and level of physical activity.
  The objective of this study was to explore whether a library of text messages we have developed were acceptable to people with type 2 diabetes when they received them.

  What we knew when we began:
  1. Following diet and physical activity advice helps to reduce the risk of health issues for people with T2DM but can be challenging 2. Text messages that include specific techniques designed to help people change their behaviour, such as setting goals, may help 3. Messages need to be acceptable to people with T2DM 4. Walk where possible, move more often, reduce portion size, reduce high sugar foods and reduce calories were identified as key target behaviours for the messages 5. Prior to this study we had developed a library of text messages that had been tested and found to be good examples of techniques they were supposed to deliver and acceptable to people with type 2 diabetes when seen as part of a survey.

  How we met our objective:
  62 people with T2DM were recruited from GP surgeries and from the Research for the Future database. They received 4 text messages per week for 8 to 12 weeks and we interviewed 51 of them.

  What we found out:
  Our messages were acceptable to people with T2DM. People reported feeling positively towards the messages and changes to their thoughts, beliefs and actions around managing their diabetes. For example, people spoke about feeling more confident they were taking the right actions following receiving the messages and this contributed to them finding the messages acceptable. People reported that receiving the messages was not burdensome.

  How we plan to share our findings
  1. Academic conference presentations and articles 2. Summaries of the research will be shared with the general public 3. We will make our data available through the Open Science Framework website

  Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)
  Our PPI co-applicant has been involved in every stage of the research including co-facilitating our focus groups. We have also met our PPI group regularly.

  What’s next?
  We will now explore the best ways to incorporate these messages into people’s self-management of diabetes. This could include using them alongside diabetes-related education courses in further research.

• REC name

  East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  23/EE/0098

• Date of REC Opinion

  25 May 2023

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion