Research and Impact: addressing health inequalities – Policy Week 2024

About the work

The two projects we worked on were as follows:

Adapting, expanding and embedding community and culture into health ecosystems (ARCHES) – This research was commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and considered the relationship between tackling health inequalities through improving access to the arts and the environment.  This project also looked at how sustainable the approaches under consideration were.

Find the outputs from ARCHES on the Locality website.

Inequalities Review – This was commissioned by the NHS Confederation and looked at how health inequalities leads in the new NHS England sub regional structures (Integrated Care Boards) responded to the allocation of some ringfenced funding to address health inequalities.

The outputs from the NHS Inequalities work can be found on the NHS Confederation site.

Our approach

In both cases we developed our research approach alongside non-academic partners. In the case of ARCHES this was with Locality who are the national membership organisation for Community Anchors. Our NHS work was commissioned by the NHS Confederation who are also a membership organisation for NHS organisations in England.

What I learnt

Access

Working with these organisations made it much easier to gain access to the organisations or individuals that we needed to talk to. All of our contacts initially came through these organisations.

Sensitivity

The relationship with these national organisations also helped us to be more attuned to the concerns and sensitivities of the people we were interviewing. The last thing that these membership bodies wanted was for our work to damage the relationships they had developed with their members or for participation to be a burden. This included helping us think through how our work was going to help the people/organisations we were interviewing.

As an example, we agreed to produce a specific case study for each organisation we worked with in the ARCHES project. While we hoped this would be of interest to the wider stakeholders it was also produced so that participating organisations could use these to promote themselves locally and to influence funders.

You can see an example of one of the case studies here.

Context

Our collaboration with these national organisations also helped us to make sure that we were able to contextualise our research within the wider policy context. Which in both cases – particularly with regard to the NHS - is in constant flux. For example, while this NHS project was in process all ICBs were told they had to make a 30% reduction in management costs.

Impact

We decided with both projects that the key output was not publishing the findings in an academic journal – but instead collaborating with supporting the national organisation to use our findings to publish a briefing in their house style that they promoted through their networks. This meant that they owned it and that they were able to use their knowledge of who the key stakeholders are (their members, other organisations, government etc) and of how best to engage and influence them using the evidence we had provided.

Academic Journals

In both project examples we are currently writing up the work for submission to peer reviewed journals. One of the opportunities this presents is to include findings that the non-academic partner did not feel able to share because of their concerns that this might affect their relationship with important external stakeholders.

The full list of project team members alongside myself is: ARCHES – Professor Anne Marie Bagnall, Professor Jane South, Dr Jo Trigwell and two external partners, Social Life and Dr Janet Harris; The NHS Confederation inequalities Review – Professor Anne Marie Bagnall, Dr Jo Trigwell and Susan Coan.