A total of 148 health and social care practitioners were trained in skills to support behaviour change: creating opportunities to discuss health behaviours, using open discovery questions, listening, reflecting and goal-setting. At three time points post-training, use of the skills was evaluated and compared with use of skills by untrained practitioners. Trained practitioners demonstrated significantly greater use of these client-centred skills to support behaviour change compared to their untrained peers up to one year post-training. Because it uses existing services to deliver support for behaviour change, this training intervention has the potential to improve public health at relatively low cost.

Results: We observed an increase in median confidence rating for having conversations about healthy eating and physical activity (both P , 0?001), and in using 'open discovery' questions (P , 0?001), after staff attended the 'Healthy Conversation Skills' training. We also found a positive relationship between the use of 'open discovery' questions and confidence in having conversations about healthy eating post-training (r 5 0?21, P 5 0?01), but a non-significant trend was observed for having conversations about physical activity (r 5 0?15, P 5 0?06).