Guidance
This guideline covers interventions that use a digital or mobile platform to help people eat more healthily, become more active, stop smoking, reduce their alcohol intake or practise safer sex. The interventions include those delivered by text message, apps, wearable devices or the internet. The guideline only includes those that are delivered by the technology itself and not by healthcare professionals using technology to deliver interventions.
NICE has also produced guidelines covering general approaches to behaviour change and individual approaches to behaviour change.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- developing digital and mobile health interventions
- commissioning digital and mobile health interventions
- using digital and mobile health interventions
- interventions for diet and physical activity
- interventions for smoking
- interventions for alcohol use
- interventions for unsafe sexual behaviour
Who is it for?
- Local policy makers and commissioners
- Individuals, groups or organisations wishing to work or working with health and social care service providers
- Designers and providers of digital and mobile health interventions and programmes
- Behaviour change practitioners
- Trained staff working in health and social care services who have contact with the general public
- People who want to improve their health-related behaviours (concerning diet and physical activity, smoking, alcohol use and safer sex), their families or carers, and other members of the public
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
NICE worked with Public Health England to develop this guideline.
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.