5-minute Fellowships: Lily Mott – Interrupting sedentary behaviour in older workers

A third of all workers in the UK are over 50 years old giving employers the opportunity to promote healthy habits among their staff coming up to retirement age. This is especially true around sitting behaviours as office workers can spend up to 82% of their working day seated in long uninterrupted stretches of time. In her PhD, Lily is using a three step design process – called the behaviour change wheel – to design and evaluate an intervention aimed at changing sedentary behaviours in older workers working from home. 

So far, Lily has run 22 online qualitative interviews from which she has extracted important themes the intervention could address. These range from older workers not being aware that sedentary behaviour has associated health risks, not thinking about their sitting behaviour, and worries about not having spare time in their working day to change habits. Lily is now half way through a series of six co-design workshops with older workers and their employers which will see her develop an intervention strategy and logic model to put to the test later in her PhD.