The impact of social norms interventions on clinical behaviour change among health workers: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis

This study aims to find out whether or not social norms interventions are effective ways of encouraging health workers to carry out desired behaviours and to identify which types of social norms intervention, if any, are most effective.MethodsA systematic review will be conducted. The inclusion criteria are a population of health professionals, a social norms intervention that seeks to change a clinical behaviour, and randomised controlled trials. Searches will be undertaken in MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, British Nursing Index, ISI Web of Science, PsycINFO and Cochrane trials. Titles and abstracts will be reviewed against the inclusion criteria to exclude any that are clearly ineligible. Two reviewers will independently screen all the remaining full texts to identify relevant papers. For studies which meet our inclusion criteria, two reviewers will extract data independently, code for behaviour change techniques and assess quality using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. The primary outcome measure will be compliance with desired behaviour. To assess the effect of social norms on the behaviour of health workers, we will perform  fixed effects meta-analysis and present forest plots, stratified by behaviour change technique. We will explore sources of variation using meta-regression and may use multi-component-based network meta-analysis to explore which forms of social norms are more likely to be effective, if our data mee t the necessary requirements.DiscussionThe study will provi...
Source: Systematic Reviews - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research