Health Inequalities in Older People – A Plan for Action
University of Bath: Nikki Coghill (PI) and Jessica Francombe-Webb
University of Bristol: Demi Patsios
Cardiff University: Shantini Paranjothy
University of Exeter: Katrina Wyatt
Background
In England, those living in the poorest communities, on average, die seven years earlier. Determinants of deprivation include: accessibility to primary, secondary, community and preventative care and food. With an increasingly ageing population, older people living in deprived communities have reduced access to these services, compromising their health and social-care, often exacerbated in areas of conflict, political and social unrest.
Public Health and Primary Care often adopt top-down approaches, identifying behaviours or individuals as ‘problems’ and developing programmes to target the behaviours or individuals. This can result in programmes that widen rather than reduce inequalities. Our proposed sandpit supports an evidence-based, bottom-up, community engagement approach, supporting communities to identify barriers to their health and wellbeing.
Our expertise, the urban-rural disparity across GW4 and our global partners uniquely places us to address the ‘Health, demographic change and wellbeing’ grand challenge and contribute to the GW4 priority areas ‘Inclusive innovative and reflective societies, and ‘Social Justice, Inequality, local and global.’ We will work with research partners in Colombia and Namibia to develop transferable adaptive processes and approaches for these developing countries and the welfare of their older populations.
Project summary
The network held a successful sandpit event “Inequalities in older people: A plan for action” to consolidate the collaborative partnerships. Discussions at this event identified several key themes and ideas for research with a subset of projects selected for further development. In the second phase of the project, the network identified community champions (based in local communities) to take forward an engagement project “Inequalities in older people: A place for action”. Their role was to learn more about their communities’ needs including their health and wellbeing priorities. This information was used as pilot data for a larger research project grant application.
The network were also asked to work with Government including meeting with Welsh Government and working with the House of Lords COVID select committee looking into inequalities in older people due to COVID-19.
