One Visit, Many Opportunities: Multi-Behavior Interventions for Men’s Health Care
Multi-behavior interventions help providers make each visit with a man a gateway to prevention and better health.
Improving men’s health isn’t only about convincing men to show up at the clinic. It’s also about what happens once they’re in the room, and that depends on what health care providers (HCPs) actually do in everyday practice.
A recent systematic review of multi‑behavior interventions for HCPs examined 17 randomized trials that tried to change more than one clinical behavior at the same time. For example they were looking to change how HCPs discussed screening, prescribed medicines or treatment, and counseled patients on lifestyle changes within a single program (Silva et al., 2026). Most interventions were brief, targeted physicians, and mixed in‑person and online components. Only a small number were clearly theory‑driven, and reporting of what, exactly, was changed was often incomplete.
For men’s health, this matters a lot.
We know many men delay or avoid care because of masculine norms, family patterns, and beliefs that “nothing is wrong” or that help‑seeking is a sign of weakness (Addis & Mahalik, 2003; Leone et al., 2016; Seidler et al., 2016). Even when men do attend primary care, they may see it as a place for acute problems, not for prevention, mental health, or sensitive topics. Reviews of men’s help‑seeking show that men are less likely to raise emotional, sexual, or lifestyle concerns and may not understand the full preventive role of primary care (Mursa et al., 2022).
That means every encounter with an HCP is a narrow but powerful window of opportunity. In a single visit, a clinician may need to check blood pressure, discuss alcohol and tobacco, screen for depression, talk about physical activity, and consider referral. They may attempt to do all of this with a patient who may be ambivalent about engaging at all. Single‑behavior interventions are unlikely to be enough.
The multi‑behavior review is a reminder that provider‑focused work must reflect this complexity. To move men’s health outcomes, we need interventions that:
Target clusters of behaviors that matter for men—such as cardiovascular risk, mental health, and substance use—rather than isolated actions.
Are grounded in behavioral theory and men‑specific evidence on access, masculinity, and help‑seeking.
Build practical tools into workflows (prompts, templates, checklists) so that asking, advising, and referring become routine.
Treat HCPs as a primary audience in men’s health policy and programming, not just neutral conduits.
Improving men’s health requires community, policy, and culture change, but it also requires redesigning the brief moments when men sit across from a provider. Well‑designed, figuring out how to deliver multi‑behavior HCP interventions effectively are one of the most promising levers we have to make those moments count.
Note: I recently learned about the woodblock prints of Sybil Andrews. What I see in Andrew’s work are images of masculine life, where individuals are working and moving collective in almost systematic ways. I like to imagine her work as appropriately aligned with my writing. The images in this blog were created using descriptions that I wrote to align with different sections of the blog. Then, I fed the descriptions into AI and instructed the tool to “generate the images inspired by the work of Sybil Andrews’ ” and I provided some links to her images as examples. You can learn more about Sybil Andrews’ interesting life and work after arriving in the Pacific Northwest at the following links: Link1, Link2 and Link3 – Google search “Sybil Andrews images”.
