What helped and hindered implementation of an intervention package to reduce smoking in pregnancy: process evaluation guided by normalization process theory.

Background: Smoking in pregnancy causes harm to mother and baby. Despite evidence from trials of what helps women quit, implementation in the real world has been hard to achieve. An evidence-based intervention, babyClear©, involving staff training, universal carbon monoxide monitoring, opt-out referral to smoking cessation services, enhanced follow-up protocols and a risk perception tool was introduced across North East England.

Does domiciliary welfare rights advice improve health-related quality of life in independent-living, socio-economically disadvantaged people aged ≥60 years? Randomised controlled trial, economic and process evaluations in the North East of England.

Background: There are major socio-economic gradients in health that could be influenced by increasing personal resources. Welfare rights advice can enhance resources but has not been rigorously evaluated for health-related impacts.

Methods: Randomised, wait-list controlled trial with individual allocation, stratified by general practice, of welfare rights advice and assistance with benefit entitlements, delivered in participants' homes by trained advisors.

Evaluation of a complex healthcare intervention to increase smoking cessation in pregnant women: interrupted time series analysis with economic evaluation.

Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of a complex intervention to improve referral and treatment of pregnant smokers in routine practice, and to assess the incremental costs to the National Health Service (NHS) per additional woman quitting smoking.

Design: Interrupted time series analysis of routine data before and after introducing the intervention, within-study economic evaluation.

Setting: Eight acute NHS hospital trusts and 12 local authority areas in North East England.

Anticipated survival and health behaviours in older English adults: cross sectional and longitudinal analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.

Background: Individuals may make a rational decision not to engage in healthy behaviours based on their assessment of the benefits of such behaviours to them, compared to other uncontrollable threats to their health. Anticipated survival is one marker of perceived uncontrollable threats to health. We hypothesised that greater anticipated survival: a) is cross-sectionally associated with healthier patterns of behaviours; b) increases the probability that behaviours will be healthier at follow up than at baseline; and c) decreases the probability that behaviours will be 'less healthy' at follow than at baseline.