Use of marketing to disseminate brief alcohol intervention to general practitioners: promoting health care interventions to health promoters

Health research findings are of little benefit to patients or society if th ey do not reach the audience they are intended to influence. Thus, a dissem ination strategy is needed to target new findings at its user group and enc ourage a process of consideration and adoption or rejection. Social marketi ng techniques can be utilized to aid successful dissemination of research f indings and to speed the process by which new information reaches practice. Principles of social marketing include manipulating the marketing mix of p roduct, price, place and promotion. This paper describes the development of a marketing approach and the outcomes from a trial evaluating the effectiv eness and cost-effectiveness of manipulating promotional strategies to diss eminate actively a screening and brief alcohol intervention (SBI) programme to general practitioners (GPs). The promotional strategies consisted of po stal marketing, telemarketing and personal marketing. The study took place in general practices across the Northern and Yorkshire Regional Health Auth ority. Of the 614 GPs eligible for the study, one per practice, 321 (52%) t ook the programme and of those available to use it for 3 months (315), 128 (41%) actively considered doing so, 73 (23%) actually went on to use it. An alysis of the specific impact of the three different promotional strategies revealed that while personal marketing was the most effective overall diss emination and implementation strategy, telemarketing was more cost-effectiv e. The findings of our work show that using a marketing approach is promisi ng for conveying research findings to GPs and in particular a focus on prom otional strategies can facilitate high levels of uptake and consideration i n this target group.