Guidance
This guideline covers a set of principles that can be used to help people change their behaviour. The aim is for practitioners to use these principles to encourage people to adopt a healthier lifestyle by, for example, stopping smoking, adopting a healthy diet and being more physically active.
Recommendations
This guideline recommends a set of principles to use as the basis for:
- providing education and training for those delivering them
- delivery of these activities, including one-to-one and community-based programmes and those aimed at specific populations
- evaluation of their effectiveness and cost effectiveness
Who is it for?
- National policy makers, commissioners, providers and practitioners in the NHS, local authorities and the community and voluntary sectors
- Researchers, including those who oversee research funding
- Social and behavioural scientists
- Health economists working on health-related knowledge, attitude and behaviour change
Is this guideline up to date?
November 2017: We have found no new evidence that affects the recommendations. For more information, see the surveillance decision.
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
This guideline was previously called behaviour change.
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.