NHS | Digital Weight Management

BACKGROUND

Obesity is a serious health concern that increases the risks of many other health conditions and nearly two-thirds of adults in England are overweight. NHS England developed a self referral programme - the Digital Weight Management Programme - to help combat this and ease GP waiting list times.

Drummond Central was appointed in 2023 to conduct a behavioural insight study to identify drivers and barriers to uptake to the programme.
From this study, we created a trial digital communication campaign to drive participation and target an under-served audience in the North East.
If successful, the client aspired to use the campaign as an example to other local authorities across the country to demonstrate how viable self-referral programmes are, as well as how effective targeted paid media campaigns can be.


TARGET AUDIENCE

Combining our behavioural data with data from NENC ICB we identified an under-served audience: males, 30-55, living with obesity in IMD deciles 1-4 in the North East of England.

We wanted to attract men who are already on the journey to managing their weight in some way. Varying from just starting to think they should do something about their weight, or have mixed feelings about it. Or they could be getting ready to make a change but don't know what their next steps are.

We knew that this audience is typically hard to reach when it comes to health messaging. This audiences is less likely to be thinking about their own health and don't consider the impact that obesity can have on their overall & longer term health.


CLIENT CHALLENGE

A key demographic was not engaging with the programme and the NHS wanted to understand the barriers to help overcome them, therefore increasing participation figures.

As the programme is both a self-referral programme and accessible remotely, a user doesn’t need to meet anyone face-to-face to access help. If more people engaged with the Digital Weight Management Programme, in turn this would help reduce health care waiting lists.

There are also huge engagement barriers to overcome with our selected audience group, therefore a big challenge was the requirement to pull the motivational lever to combat challenges like lack of self belief, fear of judgement, fear of failure & not having an easy path to take the first step.


AGENCY SOLUTION

To conduct a behavioural insight study and consequently a digital communication campaign to drive participation of an under-served audience to the Digital Weight Management Programme.

Our 6-month behavioural insight study analysed the experiences and behaviours of a range of relevant audiences: GPs, social prescribers and wellbeing coaches - all of whom were the gatekeepers to referral under the initial system, as well as a cross section of qualifying residents from deprived areas in our region, with mix of ethnic backgrounds, ages and gender represented. Using the established COM-B behaviour change framework, we developed a deep understanding of the barriers to uptake which led us to our strategic approach.

To reach our audience, we used national postcode data and the deep-end network of primary care hubs which operate in the deprived areas of NENC. We targeted people in our audience who lived within 1 mile of the practices.

We communicated to our audience through digital media, operated by our media partner SD Advertising. The digital media channels consisted of Digital Display, Social Media Advertising, YouTube and Audio Streaming.

The use of digital media gave us the power to easily swap creative executions during the pilot. It also contributed towards a seamless digital user journey as Digital Weight Management Programme is also delivered online.


THE RESULTS

Basing our strategy on the behavioural insight data led to a campaign that drove week on week growth in numbers of sign-ups. Ads consistently had click-through-rates higher than the national averages on the majority of platforms we used (particularly impressive as ours was a hard-to-reach audience who don’t normally engage with health services). Our insight helped us to develop messaging that encouraged people living with obesity to change their behaviour and sign up to the Digital Weight Management Programme.

As we introduced new channels into the campaign plan and media investment increased, the number of sign ups grew. The largest weekly increases in sign-ups came when we introduced more engaging and persuasive channels of audio and online video, with the final phase of the campaign, where the full channel mix was being used, seeing the biggest number of sign-ups for a single phase - more than three times as many as when the campaign first launched. In total the campaign resulted in 281 people starting their journey to a healthier lifestyle. Almost 9 out of 10 sign-ups were within the target audience.

The digital campaign targeted an under-served, hard-to-reach and at-risk audience which delivered incremental sign-ups to the programme and moved our region’s men from deprived communities to start their journey to a healthier lifestyle.