Developing a community facilitator‐led participatory learning and action women's group intervention to improve infant feeding, care and dental hygiene practices in South Asian infants: NEON programme

INTRODUCTION: The Nurture Early for Optimal Nutrition (NEON) study is a multiphase project that aims to optimize feeding, care and dental hygiene practices in South Asian children <2 years in East London, United Kingdom. The multiphase project uses a participatory learning and action (PLA) approach facilitated by a multilingual community facilitator. In this paper, we elaborate on the process and results of the Intervention Development Phase in the context of the wider NEON programme. METHODS: Qualitative community‐based participatory intervention codevelopment and adaptation. SETTING: Community centres in East London and online (Zoom) meetings and workshops. PARTICIPANTS: In total, 32 participants registered to participate in the Intervention Development Phase. Four Intervention Development workshops were held, attended by 25, 17, 20 and 20 participants, respectively. RESULTS: Collaboratively, a culturally sensitive NEON intervention package was developed consisting of (1) PLA group facilitator manual, (2) picture cards detailing recommended and nonrecommended feeding, care and dental hygiene practices with facilitators/barriers to uptake as well as solutions to address these, (3) healthy infant cultural recipes, (4) participatory Community Asset Maps and (5) list of resources and services supporting infant feeding, care and dental hygiene practices. CONCLUSION: The Intervention Development Phase of the NEON programme demonstrates the value of a collaborative approach between researchers, community facilitators and the target population when developing public health interventions. We recommend that interventions to promote infant feeding, care and dental hygiene practices should be codeveloped with communities. Recognizing and taking into account both social and cultural norms may be of particular value for infants from ethnically diverse communities to develop interventions that are both effective in and accepted by these communities. PATIENT AND PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT AND ENGAGEMENT: Considerable efforts were placed on Patient/Participant and Public Involvement and Engagement. Five community facilitators were identified, each of which represented one ethnic/language group: (i) Bangladeshi/Bengali and Sylheti, (ii) Pakistani/Urdu, (iii) Indian/Gujrati, (iv) Indian/Punjabi and (v) Sri Lankan/Tamil. The community facilitators were engaged in every step of the study, from the initial drafting of the protocol and study design to the Intervention Development and refinement of the NEON toolkit, as well as the publication and dissemination of the study findings. More specifically, their role in the Intervention Development Phase of the NEON programme was to: 1. Support the development of the study protocol, information sheets and ethics application. 2. Ensure any documents intended for community members are clear, appropriate and sensitively worded. 3. Develop strategies to troubleshoot any logistical challenges of project delivery, for example, recruitment shortfalls. 4. Contribute to the writing of academic papers, in particular reviewing and revising drafts. 5. Develop plain language summaries and assist in dissemination activities, for example, updates on relevant websites. 6. Contribute to the development of the NEON intervention toolkit and recruitment of the community members. 7. Attend and contribute to Intervention Development workshops, ensuring the participant's voices were the focus of the discussion and workshop outcomes.