Making Every Contact Count (MECC)  is an evidenced-based approach to improving people’s health and wellbeing by helping them change their behaviour. Involves opportunistically engaging people in conversations about their health in a respectful way and signposting them to further information and support.

The frontline workforce across health, local authority and voluntary sectors, have thousands of contacts every day with individuals and are ideally placed to promote health and wellbeing.

MECC training provides staff with the competence and confidence to deliver healthy lifestyle messages and the encouragement for people to change their behaviour and to signpost to local services that can support them to change. MECC training via eLearning provides the opportunity to upskill the workforce at scale and pace.

Healthy Dialogues were commissioned by Health Education England to review their previous MECC eLearning packages and develop a single engaging and dynamic MECC eLearning. The purpose of project was to provide a free, accessible resource that motivates the wider Public Health workforce to develop their MECC role and conversations.

Methodology

We interviewed locality leads and users from across the England and the Isle of Mann and tested user experience of completing the eLearning to capture their opinions on what the what worked well and what could be improved on the previous eLearning programmes.

Based on these findings, we developed revised that brought together the learner needs as well as the varying MECC priorities across the regions. We included behaviour change techniques to address barriers and facilitators to MECC conversations. These included:

• Providing simple guidance and instructions on how to have a MECC conversation
• Using case studies to encourage learners to find solutions within MECC conversation examples
• Signposting to communities of practice where learners could find social support
• Ask learners to problem solving around their own personal barriers to delivering MECC
• Asked learners to create ‘If-then’ plans to build habitual MECC conversations

In its development, we followed the Behavioural Insights framework EAST to ensure that, where possible, the eLearning was Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely for learners to engage with. For example:

• Easy: We simplified messages and remove some barriers to accessing the eLearning
• Attractive: we ensured the eLearning was interactive, and by using engaging design the training presents as friendly and fun
• Social: Within the training content we highlighted the norm of MECC conversation, demonstrating the wide range of professions who deliver MECC.
• Timely: We shortened the training from previous version so that learners can complete it in a shorter time, and in small chunks.

We worked closely with our project reference group of HEE and Public Health England MECC leads from across England who provided expertise and guidance, and the HEE eLearning for Healthcare team who developed our content into a new eLearning package.

Outcome

Our revised HEE MECC eLearning has been well received as a friendly and memorable eLearning that has appeal across a range of settings, professions including the health and care, paid and unpaid workforce, voluntary and charitable sectors.

You can check it out here!