Southwark: Trialling Letters for Diabetes Prevention Program uptake
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Use of personalisation to increase uptake of National Diabetes Prevention Program in Southwark
IRAS ID
208605
Contact name
Tim Chadborn
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Public Health England
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 3 months, 0 days
Research summary
The aim of the project is to ascertain if adding personalised diabetes risk information to invitation letters will increase the likelihood of recipients contacting and engaging with the Diabetes Prevention Program in Southwark. These individuals will be sent letters to invite them to participate in the National Diabetes Prevention Program in Southwark regardless of this trial. Specifically, we provided Southwark with a best-practice “baseline” letter, based on previous research. We set this letter out against an intervention letter including a personalised, visual risk display of developing diabetes, alongside a personally relevant risk statement. Based on previous research on the addition of a ‘social norm’ in reducing antibiotic prescription (Hallsworth et al., 2016) and increasing tax payments on time (BIT-CO, 2011) we would predict that this would increase the uptake of the NDPP in Southwark using social normative personalisation. Letters are personalised by visually displaying the percentage of HbA1c in their blood, as a diabetes marker in their blood. Letters will be sent to 7000-10000 pre-diabetic individuals over the course of 1 year, depending on their status at the time of the trial. Each month letters will be sent to patients from 3-6 practices (after initial month, this number will be re-evaluated depending on uptake). Within each practice half of pre-diabetics will be allocated to the intervention group and half to the control group. The primary outcome measures will be their 1) enrolment to the NDPP 2) adherence to the NDPP 3) completion of the NDPP, comparing across intervention and control groups. As a secondary aim, this study will evaluate the above by GP practice, by gender, ethnic groups, socio-economic status, age and BMI groups.
REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/LO/1109
Date of REC Opinion
13 Jun 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion