Interdisciplinary work
PASS brings together the following disciplines: medicine, clinical epidemiologym, behavioural science, social science, and user-centred design.
Epidemiology & data science
We use clinical epidemiology and data science to measure variation in and patterns of antibiotic use. This helps us to specify the behaviours we should target.
Behavioural science
Having specified the behaviour, next we use qualitative interviews to explore the drivers of prescribing in each healthcare setting. We also undertake ethnographic observations of practice to identify contextual factors that influence prescribing.
We now have a picture of the factors which drive the behaviours that we would like to target. But what types of interventions are most likely to be effective? Systematic reviews of existing interventions help to identify previous interventions and explore which ones were effective. We can also look at the “active ingredients” (behaviour change techniques) that were included in these interventions, and map them against our findings from the interviews and ethnography. This helps us work out which type of interventions are most likely to work, given what we know about the drivers of prescribing in each healthcare setting.
User-centered design
Finally, ideas for interventions are developed further by healthcare designers, who work with healthcare professionals and patients to consider how these approaches might be optimised and implemented to best effect.
