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Creating and Breaking Habit in Healthcare Professional Behaviours to Improve Healthcare and Health

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The Psychology of Habit

Abstract

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) prescribe, provide advice, conduct examinations, perform surgical procedures, and engage in a range of clinical behaviours. Their clinical actions are characteristically performed repeatedly—sometimes multiple times per day—in the same physical locations with the same colleagues and patients, under constant time pressure, and competing demands. This repetition under pressure in a stable setting provides ideal circumstances for creating contingencies between physical and social cues and clinical actions. HCP behaviour provides an ideal setting in which to advance theory, methods, and interventions to better understand habit formation and habit reversal. Contemporary theoretical and methodological development in the psychology of habit has begun to be applied to understand and promote the formation, breaking, and replacement of habitual behaviour in HCPs. This chapter highlights key theoretical approaches, methods, and intervention techniques that have been applied to conceptualize, measure, develop, and break habit and automaticity in HCPs. These insights have the potential to synergistically contribute novel perspectives to the wider habit literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Nursing, Midwifery and Health, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Sebastian Potthoff

  2. Centre for Implementation Research, Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Nicola McCleary & Justin Presseau

  3. School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Nicola McCleary & Justin Presseau

  4. Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Falko F. Sniehotta

  5. Fuse, The UK Clinical Research Collaboration Centre of Excellence for Translational Research in Public Health, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Falko F. Sniehotta

  6. School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Justin Presseau

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  1. Sebastian Potthoff
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  2. Nicola McCleary
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  3. Falko F. Sniehotta
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  4. Justin Presseau
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Correspondence to Justin Presseau .

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Bas Verplanken

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Potthoff, S., McCleary, N., Sniehotta, F.F., Presseau, J. (2018). Creating and Breaking Habit in Healthcare Professional Behaviours to Improve Healthcare and Health. In: Verplanken, B. (eds) The Psychology of Habit. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97529-0_14

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