There is a growing emphasis on interventions where clinicians identify and aim to change unhealthy habits in individuals, such as dietary advice for people with obesity.1 2 Although such individually oriented lifestyle interventions (IOLIs) might be effective, it may not be feasible to implement all recommended IOLIs in the care of many eligible individuals, given the finite resources within health systems.3 Time needed to treat (TNT) has been proposed as a measure of guideline feasibility in practice.4 TNT estimates the fraction of the available time that clinicians would need to implement the recommendation. We aimed to estimate the TNT to provide all IOLIs recommended in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines to the eligible adult population in the UK.

A companion project outlining the methods in more detail has been reported elsewhere.5 In short, we multiplied the time needed for the relevant category of healthcare personnel to provide each recommended intervention to one individual by the number of eligible individuals in the UK population and converted those numbers into full time equivalents (FTEs) per 10 000 adults. A prospectively developed protocol and all extracted data are available at osf.io/42juh and osf.io/jw3ar/.

An IOLI was defined as any non-pharmacological intervention provided by clinicians to adults to improve their mental or physical health by targeting one or more of the following lifestyle habits: physical activity/exercise, diet, smoking and alcohol intake.

We systematically searched all NICE pathways (26 August 2020), and two authors independently and in duplicate screened retrieved eligible guidelines and extracted …