Implementing Drinkbreak - the issues we face

This blog deals with how we are implementing drinkbreak to be as easy to use, effective and accessible as possible.

One of the big problems with any online intervention is to overcome the “digital divide”. This is the concern that some groups don’t use digital for a variety of reasons and this may reflect pre-existing social and economic inequalities. To address this we made the decision early on to ensure that we keep language as straightforward as possible and, most importantly, it doesn’t require the most expensive and up to date smart phone to use. In fact we are starting with a web-based version that is basic phone compatible rather than going straight to an app. We are also making it inexpensive.

No big data downloads and we will keep a free version available. We have to charge for the full version as we have costs to cover and no other source of funding.  Many people worry about privacy and confidentiality. This is a big priority for us and our privacy notice and terms and conditions are as simple and transparent as possible whilst keeping within the legislative requirements.

We are lucky to have close links with academic eHealth units and Stuart Linke has been involved in many different online research projects and has been able to use the learning from these to benefit drinkbreak. So we are using techniques of tailoring, tunnelling, chunking and feedback to help people stay engaged for long enough to use the full programme. Ideally we would use multi- media ways of presenting our material, but we don’t have the budget yet – but when we do have we will!

Finaly all the implementation research we did with downyourdrink has fed into and helped us remodel to create drinkbreak. This includes formative evaluations, “talk aloud” studies, detailed analysis of the qualitative results and loads of feedback from real users who told us what worked well and what didn’t. Hopefully the navigation within the site is easy to use and the information presented manageable for people who want to use drinkbreak in short sessions as well as long ones.