Publications by authors named "Tony Heffernan"

Objective: Early-life nutrition plays a key role in establishing healthy lifestyles and preventing chronic disease. This study aimed to (1) explore healthcare professionals' (HCP) opinions on the acceptability of and factors influencing the delivery of interventions to promote healthy infant feeding behaviours within primary care and (2) identify proposed barriers/enablers to delivering such interventions during vaccination visits, to inform the development of a childhood obesity prevention intervention.

Design: A qualitative study design was employed using semi-structured telephone interviews.

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Objectives And Design: There is growing recognition of the need for effective behaviour change interventions to prevent chronic diseases that are feasible and sustainable and can be implemented within routine health care systems. Focusing on implementation from the outset of intervention development, and incorporating multiple stakeholder perspectives to achieve this, is therefore essential. This study explores the development of the Choosing Healthy Eating for Infant Health (CHErIsH) childhood obesity prevention intervention and implementation strategy to improve infant feeding behaviours.

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Introduction: Childhood obesity is a public health challenge. There is evidence for associations between parents' feeding behaviours and childhood obesity risk. Primary care provides a unique opportunity for delivery of infant feeding interventions for childhood obesity prevention.

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Background: Opioids are an effective treatment for moderate-to-severe pain. However, they are associated with a number of gastrointestinal side effects, most commonly constipation. Laxatives do not target the underlying mechanism of opioid-induced constipation (OIC), so many patients do not have their symptoms resolved.

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There has been a substantial increase in Multimorbidity, worldwide. Extensive empirical research has found that General Practitioners (GPs) often feel overwhelmed when dealing with such patients [1]. While clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are effective at reducing clinical decision errors and improving healthcare processes across diverse settings [2], the use of CDSS within multimorbidity care is under investigated.

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