Behavioural insights, or ‘nudges’ as they are often known, combine lessons from behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience to better understand how humans behave and make everyday decisions. What this shows us is that, very often, we do not behave in a way that we would be expected to if we were perfectly ‘rational’ human beings. Behavioural insight interventions are not the silver bullet that can solve every problem, but they can be applied to encourage more informed behaviour change approaches and innovative policy solutions.
In this webinar, we heard from Professor Ivo VIaev, Professor of Behavioural Science at University of Warwick, who has led various research projects on this theme, some of which were funded as part of the Health Foundation’s Behavioural Insights Research Programme. Professor Ivo Vlaev spoke about the range of nudges which quality improvements can draw onto successfully change a range of health behaviours (such as optimizing medication prescribing). But also when nudges didn’t work in prompting hand hygiene and instead led to a diagnostic survey and crowdsourcing ‘nudgeathon’.
The event was chaired by Eric Barratt, Q member and convenor of the Applying behavioural insights in healthcare Special Interest Group and supported by Anita Mehay (Improvement Fellow) and Hassan Hoque (Improvement Intern) at the Health Foundation.