Evaluating the effectiveness of health belief model interventions in improving adherence: a systematic review

Lack of adherence to health-promoting advice challenges the successful prevention and management of many conditions. The Health Belief Model (HBM) was developed in 1966 to predict health-promoting behaviour and has been used in patients with wide variety of disease. The HBM has also been used to inform the development of interventions to improve health behaviours. Several reviews have documented the HBM's performance in predicting behaviour, but no review has addressed its utility in the design of interventions or the efficacy of these interventions. A systematic review was conducted to identify interventional studies which use the HBM as the theoretical basis for intervention design. The HBM has been used continuously in the development of behaviour change interventions for 40 years. Of 18 eligible studies, 14 (78%) reported significant improvements in adherence, with 7 (39%) showing moderate to large effects. However, only six studies used the HBM in its entirety and five different studies measured health beliefs as outcomes. Intervention success appeared to be unrelated to HBM construct addressed challenging the utility of this model as the theoretical basis for adherence-enhancing interventions. Interventions need to be described in full to allow for the identification of effective components and replication of studies.