Does social marketing provide a framework for changing healthcare practice?
OBJECTIVE
We argue that social marketing can be used as a generic framework for analysing barriers to the take-up of clinical guidelines, and planning interventions which seek to enable this change.


METHODS
We reviewed the literature on take-up of clinical guidelines, in particular barriers and enablers to change; social marketing principles and social marketing applied to healthcare. We then applied the social marketing framework to analyse the literature and to consider implications for future guideline policy to assess its feasibility and accessibility.


RESULTS
There is sizeable extant literature on healthcare practitioners' non-compliance with clinical guidelines. This is an international problem common to a number of settings. The reasons for poor levels of take up appear to be well understood, but not addressed adequately in practice. Applying a social marketing framework brings new insights to the problem."


CONCLUSIONS
We show that a social marketing framework provides a useful solution-focused framework for systematically understanding barriers to individual behaviour change and designing interventions accordingly. Whether the social marketing framework provides an effective means of bringing about behaviour change remains an empirical question which has still to be tested in practice. The analysis presented here provides strong motivation to begin such testing.
Morris
Zoë Slote
ZS
Engineering Design Centre, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB21PZ, UK. zsm20@cam.ac.uk
Clarkson
Peter John
PJ
D019983:Guideline Adherence; D006801:Humans; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D040241:Social Marketing