Building a Behavioural Intervention Programme to Improve Self-Management of Diabetes

Effective control of diabetes requires patients to change their daily behaviour. The investigators propose an intervention programme for behavioural change with two components, targeting motivation and implementation. The motivation component raises the salience of probable patient-specific detrimental future outcomes by 'fast-forwarding' awareness of these outcomes to the present. The implementation component helps patients to set goals and to act based on weekly tips. A factorial design will be used to establish the necessity and sufficiency of the two components on changing mind and guiding behaviour to improve blood glucose level. Individual-level measures of psychological, physical and medical conditions will be shown to drive the heterogenous responses to the two components. Intervention is expanded into two cycles with crossover design to demonstrate how the individual-level measures drive the wear-off, built-up and persistence of the two components. The results of this two-component programme will serve as a basis for systematic synthesis of component-level effectiveness in behavioural intervention research.