Applying the time needed to treat to NICE guidelines on lifestyle interventions

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.