Evaluation of the Effectiveness and Implementation of the BETTER Women Peer Health Coaching Program

While the BETTER program has been shown to successfully increase the number of preventive care and screening actions completed by patient participants after six months, it is known that it is difficult to maintain new health behaviours in the long-term. Unfortunately, it is not feasible to fund health professionals to offer repeated follow-up visits over the time needed to turn initial behaviour changes into long-term habits. Therefore, the investigators are building upon the existing BETTER program by adding a peer health coaching extension that will provide time-limited coaching for patients who want support as they work towards achieving preventive health goals. This approach takes advantage of growing awareness of the role of lay health coaches in improving and extending the quality and value of primary care.

This is a three-site, pragmatic, wait-list-controlled, randomized, Type 1 hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial with blinded outcome collection after 6 months. One site will be an urban, academic, hospital-based clinic; the second will be a clinic serving a greater proportion of patients from rural areas; and the third site will be a suburban clinic with a large South Asian population. Investigators will invite women who are 40-65 years old to have a single visit with a prevention practitioner and receive behaviour change support for up to six months from a health coach. Coaches will do a 24-hr training course, which includes special techniques to support health behaviour change, before they are matched to a patient. At the suburban site, only South Asian peer health coaches will be recruited and this work is being guided by a South Asian Community Advisory Council made up of members of various community organizations in that region. Patients who enroll in BETTER Women will be randomized to receive health coaching either immediately (intervention group) or after a 6-month delay (wait-list control group).

Effectiveness of the program will be assessed by evaluating for each patient, how many of a set of target chronic disease prevention and screening actions were completed at six months, in comparison to baseline. Investigators will also assess whether patients achieved the health goals that they set with their prevention practitioners, physiological markers of health, as well as habits and behaviours related to diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol use. These outcomes will be collected via electronic surveys administered at baseline, 3- and 6-months* post enrollment as well as through extraction of data from the patients' electronic medical records and BETTER program documents. These outcomes will be compared between the two groups of patients in the study. Additionally, investigators will survey intervention group participants and extract relevant data from their electronic medical records at 12-months* post enrollment.

An embedded process evaluation will be conducted during the trial to examine the implementation of the program. The process evaluation will include collection of program data, electronic surveys administered to patients as well as qualitative interviews with intervention group patients, peer health coaches and prevention practitioners. Investigators will examine how acceptable the program was to patients; whether and why any adaptations were made; how well the program was utilized; how well the coaches delivered the intervention (e.g., what behaviour change techniques were used); how engaged patients and coaches were with the program; and mechanism(s) of action. Ultimately, investigators expect to gain an understanding of the program's sustainability, acceptability, cost-effectiveness, and factors that might impact future attempts at spread and scale.

Investigators expect to see that women in the intervention group (i.e., those who had a health coach) will complete more preventive and screening actions after six months. Investigators also expect to see that women in the intervention group will make more progress on achieving health goals and making lifestyle changes which reduce the risk of chronic diseases and cancers, that the intervention will increase women's access to resources in their primary care clinics and community, as well as improve the women's ability to maintain healthy behaviours.

Note*: We initially planned to collect surveys and data for the primary outcome (for both groups) at 12 months post enrollment. However, due to pandemic-related recruitment challenges, we amended the data collection timeline as described above to allow more time for recruitment within our project timeline.