Background: Adopting and maintaining healthy diet and physical activity (PA) behaviours can be difficult in populations like nurses, who have a stressful job, with long working hours and shift work. Irregular meal patters, frequent snacking on energy-dense nutrient poor foods (EDNP), and inactivity is common in this group, with 62% of Australian and New Zealand nurses being overweight or obese. The aim of this study was to deliver a 3-month workplace intervention study to improve diet and PA behaviours in nurses, given the paucity of such studies in the literature.
Methods:The intervention was developed with input from the target population, and included pedometers, a smartphone app, and a dedicated Facebook group as intervention materials. Primary outcomes included diet (food frequency questionnaire) and PA (accelerometer). Secondary outcomes included weight, BMI, waist circumference, and blood pressure. All measurements were taken at baseline, end of the intervention (3-months) and follow-up (6-months).
Results: 47 nurses, 41.4±12.1 years old and 87% female working at two hospitals in Brisbane (Australia) participated in the study. At 3-months, total energy intake coming from fruit and vegetables increased by 3.8%, while it decreased for EDNP foods (- 0.8%). There was a -0.5% decrease on time spent in moderate-to-vigorous PA, and a decreased in average daily steps (- 500 steps/day). At 6-months, dietary outcomes were maintained, while daily steps and sedentary time slightly decreased from 3-months. There were small changes on weight and BMI at 3- and 6-months.
Conclusions: This intervention showed improvements on diet, potentially at the cost of PA behaviour. Participants indicated that changing both behaviours was too hard, suggesting that in time-poor and stressed populations changing one behaviour at the time could be more feasible and effective. Recruitment and retention barriers exist in this hard-to-reach group, which should be considered in future studies.