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Article History

Received: 21 August 2018

Accepted: 19 December 2018

First Online: 5 January 2019

Author’s information

: The author CC is a current PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland and will be undertaking this study as their PhD project, while HN, JR and IW are members of their supervisory team. Consequently the recruitment, implementation of the intervention, data collection for the cluster randomised pilot study, economic evaluation and process evaluation, and analysis of collected data, will all be completed by CC. Ideally these roles would be performed by different people or research teams to prevent introduction of bias, such as the halo effect, but the constraints of a PhD project do not allow this.

: This study has obtained ethical approval from the Office of Research Ethics Committees Northern Ireland (Ref: 18/NI/0091). An informed consent form will be signed by patients participating in the cluster randomised pilot study and parallel feasibility economic evaluation. A separate consent form will also be signed by patients and healthcare staff who participate in the parallel process evaluation.

: Not applicable

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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