What is CoHeRe?

COVID Health Related Behaviour Review project is a series of systematic reviews and an evidence and gap map on determinants of behaviours recommended to reduce the spread of COVID. the project is funded by UKRI rolling call:

https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FW002507%2F1#/tabOverview

Health-protective behaviours, like washing your hands, wearing a facemask and social distancing, can help to protect people from contracting or transmitting COVID and other similar serious respiratory infections. This project aims to help us understand more about the factors that influence these behaviours in the general public.

The overall goal of our project is to understand what determines people's positive health protective behaviours. This in turn will help decision makers and researchers in understanding how best to support people to adopt behaviours to protect themselves and others from contracting or passing on COVID and other similar serious respiratory viral infections. 

You can find out more about the project at our Open Science Foundation page:

https://osf.io/hv5s3/  

You can follow us on twitter too, we auto tweet papers on Behaviour and COVID that you might find useful: 

https://twitter.com/CoHeReQUB  

What has already been done?

In summer 2020 we conducted a rapid review of published studies that looked at the things that influenced uptake of these protective behaviours during COVID or during previous outbreaks of similar serious respiratory infections, for example SARS, MERS and H1N1 (swine flu). You can find our reports at our open access framework (osf) page https://osf.io/hv5s3/    

The review of research conducted during previous pandemics have also been published in a COVID Special Issue of the journal Acta Psychologica

Prof Martin Dempster and Dr Jennifer Hanratty from the CoHeRe project have provided insight into what COVID-19 has shown us about the best ways to encourage people to adopt preventive health behaviours.  You can view this report at the International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO) webpage.

What is going to happen next?

Now we are going to conduct a series of Campbell systematic reviews on the same topic. This will incorporate the studies we already know about and the large amount of research conducted in the context of COVID-19 since we last searched for studies in July 2020.  

To begin with, we have published an open access 'evidence and gap map' (EGM) that will contain information on all of the studies we have already found (in the rapid review). Our EGM is open to anyone to use and allows other researchers, policy makers and those who fund research to see what evidence we already know about and where the gaps in our knowledge are.  Download our EGM here.

The next step will be to conduct a series of systematic reviews. These new reviews, one for each behaviour of interest, will include new studies and any unpublished work that we didn't find in our rapid review. We will also add any new studies we find to the EGM as we identify them so that the Evidence and Gap map stays “live”. 

The last part of our project will be to periodically update our searches to capture any new evidence as it emerges and integrate that into the reviews. This is called a 'living review' and the reviews will remain living for at least the life of the project (till October 2022). We will work on using technology to find ways to make this process as efficient as possible so that our reviews stay up to date and available to use – now and into the future.