‘NHS professionals have millions of contacts with patients every year; using those contacts to provide advice, brief interventions and referral to targeted services can help in supporting people to live healthier and more independent lives’ (DH 2011). Professional organisations such as the Royal College of General Practitioners (2013) and the Royal College of Nursing (2012) also encourage healthcare staff to promote prevention alongside treatment and cure. Hence, the responsibility for one-to-one delivery of public health interventions falls not just to specialists in behaviour change, but to nurses, doctors and healthcare assistants, who have a vital role in both planned and opportunistic healthcare encounters. However, front line practitioners do not appear to routinely have healthy lifestyle conversations with their patients (Elwell et al 2013).