Behavioural Insights for Public Health Programmes Training Course

Course Introduction

Public health programmes depend heavily on human behaviour, from vaccination and screening to treatment adherence, healthy lifestyles, preventive care, sanitation, maternal and child health practices, and timely use of health services. Policies and programmes can provide information and resources, but people’s decisions are also shaped by habits, emotions, social norms, trust, convenience, perceived risk, cognitive biases, and the environments in which choices are made.

Behavioural Insights for Public Health Programmes Training Course equips public health leaders, programme managers, policymakers, and practitioners with practical methods for understanding and influencing behaviours that affect population health. Participants will learn how to identify behavioural barriers, investigate the reasons behind health-related decisions, develop evidence-based interventions, and integrate behavioural science into programme design, implementation, communication, monitoring, and evaluation.

The course focuses on real public health implementation challenges such as vaccine hesitancy, missed appointments, low screening participation, treatment non-adherence, delayed care-seeking, inadequate preventive practices, poor uptake of health services, and difficulties maintaining healthy behaviours. Participants will learn how to distinguish behavioural barriers from structural constraints such as affordability, availability, accessibility, infrastructure, service quality, and health-system capacity.

Participants will apply practical behavioural tools including COM-B, EAST, behavioural journey mapping, choice architecture, behavioural segmentation, social norms analysis, friction mapping, prompts, reminders, defaults, feedback, incentives, and message framing. These methods will help programme teams design interventions around the realities of people’s lives rather than relying solely on assumptions about knowledge, attitudes, or rational decision-making.

Rigorous testing and evaluation are central to effective behavioural public health practice. Participants will learn how to formulate behavioural hypotheses, select appropriate indicators, design pilots and experiments, interpret behavioural evidence, assess intervention effectiveness, and identify opportunities for adaptation and scale. The programme also considers how behavioural insights can strengthen community engagement, health communications, frontline service delivery, digital health, and programme implementation.

Ethical and equitable application is fundamental in public health. The course therefore examines autonomy, informed choice, privacy, health equity, cultural sensitivity, vulnerable populations, stigma, trust, misinformation, digital exclusion, and unintended consequences. Participants will also explore emerging issues involving artificial intelligence, personalized health communications, behavioural data, digital nudges, social media, and predictive analytics, enabling them to apply behavioural science responsibly while improving measurable health outcomes.

Duration

5 days

Who Should Attend

• Senior public health executives responsible for population health, programme performance, policy implementation, and health outcomes.

• Directors and managers of national, regional, county, municipal, and community public health programmes.

• Public health policy officers designing prevention strategies, health policies, interventions, and implementation frameworks.

• Health programme managers responsible for vaccination, screening, maternal health, nutrition, infectious disease, chronic disease, or health promotion programmes.

• Monitoring and evaluation specialists assessing behavioural outcomes, intervention effectiveness, programme reach, and public health impact.

• Health promotion and behaviour change communication professionals designing campaigns, messages, community interventions, and engagement strategies.

• Community health programme managers working with households, communities, local leaders, health workers, and vulnerable population groups.

• Health service designers and citizen or patient experience professionals improving access, uptake, navigation, and use of public health services.

• Epidemiologists and public health analysts examining behavioural patterns, health service utilization, risk factors, and population-level outcomes.

• Health data and digital health professionals working with behavioural, administrative, patient, programme, survey, and service-use data.

• Healthcare managers seeking behavioural approaches to improve attendance, adherence, preventive care, patient engagement, and service utilization.

• Health communications and public information officers developing behaviourally informed public health messages and campaigns.

• Non-governmental organization and development programme managers implementing behaviour change and public health initiatives.

• Consultants and public sector advisors supporting governments and health institutions with behavioural science, programme improvement, health promotion, and implementation.

Course Objectives

• Explain behavioural science principles and demonstrate how psychological, social, environmental, and contextual factors influence public health behaviours and outcomes.

• Diagnose behavioural barriers affecting prevention, health service uptake, treatment adherence, screening, vaccination, care-seeking, and other priority public health behaviours.

• Apply behavioural frameworks such as COM-B and EAST to identify capability, opportunity, motivation, environmental, social, and contextual drivers of health behaviour.

• Conduct behavioural journey mapping to identify decision points, friction, information gaps, emotional responses, access barriers, drop-offs, and opportunities for public health intervention.

• Design behaviourally informed interventions using appropriate approaches such as simplification, reminders, prompts, social norms, defaults, feedback, framing, and timely communication.

• Integrate behavioural insights into public health policy, programme design, implementation planning, community engagement, health promotion, digital health, and service improvement.

• Develop behavioural hypotheses and intervention theories that clearly connect identified behavioural drivers with proposed interventions and measurable health outcomes.

• Design practical pilots, experiments, and evaluations to assess intervention effectiveness, implementation feasibility, cost, equity, sustainability, and opportunities for wider scale-up.

• Apply ethical and equity-focused principles to behavioural public health interventions while protecting autonomy, privacy, dignity, informed choice, cultural sensitivity, and vulnerable populations.

• Establish sustainable behavioural insights capabilities that connect research, programme management, health communications, data analytics, experimentation, evaluation, learning, and continuous improvement.

Comprehensive Course Outline

Module 1: Foundations of Behavioural Insights in Public Health

• Understanding behavioural science and its relevance to prevention, health promotion, service utilization, treatment adherence, and population health outcomes.

• Exploring psychology, behavioural economics, social psychology, decision science, habit formation, social norms, and environmental influences on health behaviour.

• Distinguishing behavioural barriers from structural determinants such as poverty, availability, affordability, infrastructure, service quality, and healthcare access.

• Reviewing practical applications of behavioural insights across vaccination, screening, nutrition, maternal health, infectious diseases, chronic conditions, and preventive care.

Module 2: Understanding Health Behaviour and Decision-Making

• Examining how risk perception, trust, emotions, habits, cognitive biases, social influences, incentives, convenience, and perceived benefits shape health decisions.

• Understanding present bias, optimism bias, omission bias, loss aversion, social proof, choice overload, and other mechanisms affecting public health behaviours.

• Examining the difference between health knowledge, stated intentions, observed behaviour, and sustained behaviour change in real-world programme settings.

• Using research, programme data, interviews, observations, surveys, and community insights to understand why people make particular health-related decisions.

Module 3: Behavioural Diagnosis and Health Journey Mapping

• Developing behavioural problem statements that identify the target population, desired health behaviour, context, barriers, behavioural mechanisms, and intended outcome.

• Mapping health journeys across awareness, decision-making, service access, appointment attendance, treatment, follow-up, and long-term behaviour maintenance.

• Identifying behavioural friction involving forms, waiting times, information complexity, service navigation, stigma, uncertainty, transportation, timing, and digital access.

• Applying behavioural diagnostic frameworks to distinguish capability, opportunity, motivation, social influences, environmental conditions, and service-system constraints.

Module 4: Behaviourally Informed Public Health Programme Design

• Applying behavioural science to the design of public health programmes, prevention strategies, health services, community interventions, and population health initiatives.

• Using simplification, prompts, reminders, defaults, social norms, feedback, salience, commitment mechanisms, and choice architecture appropriately.

• Integrating behavioural approaches with theories of change, results frameworks, implementation plans, health promotion strategies, and programme logic models.

• Designing interventions that are feasible, culturally appropriate, accessible, equitable, measurable, sustainable, and responsive to local health priorities.

Module 5: Behaviour Change Communication and Community Engagement

• Designing public health communications that make desired actions clear, relevant, credible, timely, accessible, understandable, and practically achievable.

• Applying framing, social norms, trusted messengers, prompts, reminders, storytelling, salience, and audience segmentation to health communications.

• Developing behaviourally informed engagement strategies for communities, health workers, schools, households, local leaders, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders.

• Addressing misinformation, distrust, stigma, health myths, cultural beliefs, social pressures, and communication barriers that may influence public health behaviour.

Module 6: Behavioural Approaches to Health Service Uptake and Adherence

• Applying behavioural insights to improve vaccination, screening, appointment attendance, preventive care, treatment initiation, treatment adherence, and follow-up.

• Identifying barriers affecting timely care-seeking, service navigation, medication adherence, healthy routines, and continued engagement with health programmes.

• Designing reminders, prompts, simplified processes, defaults, feedback, commitment mechanisms, and supportive communications that encourage sustained health behaviours.

• Measuring behavioural changes in service utilization, attendance, adherence, completion, retention, and preventive practices while considering equity and unintended effects.

Module 7: Behavioural Experimentation and Public Health Evaluation

• Developing behavioural hypotheses that specify the target behaviour, intervention mechanism, expected response, health outcome, and measurable indicators.

• Designing randomized trials, A/B tests, pilots, quasi-experimental evaluations, and implementation studies appropriate for public health interventions.

• Establishing behavioural indicators, baseline measures, comparison groups, implementation metrics, outcome measures, and criteria for intervention effectiveness.

• Interpreting evidence while considering statistical uncertainty, effect sizes, implementation fidelity, context, population differences, costs, equity, and sustainability.

Module 8: Behavioural Data, Digital Health, and Analytics

• Using health programme data, service utilization records, surveys, behavioural research, digital engagement data, and other evidence to understand population behaviour.

• Applying behavioural segmentation and analytics to identify different patterns of health behaviour, service usage, risk, motivation, capability, and engagement.

• Exploring digital nudges, mobile health platforms, automated reminders, personalized communications, online services, and technology-enabled behaviour change interventions.

• Establishing safeguards for health data privacy, cybersecurity, consent, data quality, algorithmic fairness, transparency, human oversight, and responsible analytics.

Module 9: Emerging Behavioural Issues in Public Health

• Examining the influence of social media, misinformation, digital communities, online influencers, artificial intelligence, and rapidly changing information environments on health behaviour.

• Exploring personalized health communications, predictive analytics, adaptive interventions, digital nudges, and emerging AI applications in public health programmes.

• Addressing behavioural challenges associated with climate-related health risks, antimicrobial resistance, changing disease patterns, urbanization, population mobility, and health emergencies.

• Assessing unintended consequences including intervention fatigue, stigma, exclusion, distrust, behavioural substitution, inequitable impacts, and declining confidence in health institutions.

Module 10: Ethics, Equity, and Institutionalizing Behavioural Public Health

• Applying ethical principles including autonomy, informed choice, transparency, privacy, dignity, proportionality, fairness, cultural sensitivity, and protection of vulnerable populations.

• Designing behaviour change interventions that account for health inequalities, disability, language, literacy, socioeconomic circumstances, digital access, geography, and cultural diversity.

• Establishing behavioural insights teams, governance arrangements, research standards, ethical review processes, experimentation protocols, and evidence-sharing mechanisms.

• Measuring behavioural public health impact through service uptake, prevention behaviours, adherence, health outcomes, equity, cost-effectiveness, citizen experience, and sustainable programme performance.

Training Approach

This course will be delivered by our skilled trainers who have vast knowledge and experience as expert professionals in the fields. The course is taught in English and through a mix of theory, practical activities, group discussion and case studies. Course manuals and additional training materials will be provided to the participants upon completion of the training.

Tailor-Made Course

This course can also be tailor-made to meet organization requirement. For further inquiries, please contact us on: Email: training@upskilldevelopment.com Tel: +254 721 331 808

Training Venue 

The training will be held at our Upskill Training Centre. We also offer training for a group (at a discount of 10% to 50%) at requested location all over the world. The Onsite course fee covers the course tuition, training materials, two break refreshments, buffet lunch, airport transfers, Upskill gift package, and guided tour.

Visa application, travel expenses, dinners, accommodation, insurance, and other personal expenses are catered by the participant

Certification

Participants will be issued with Upskill certificate upon completion of this course.

Airport Pickup and Accommodation

Airport pickup and accommodation is arranged upon request. For booking contact our Training Coordinator through Email: training@upskilldevelopment.com, +254 721 331 808

Terms of Payment:

Unless otherwise agreed between the two parties’ payment of the course fee should be done 3 working days before commencement of the training so as to enable us to prepare better.