The UKRI ESRC Newton grant will fund the 3-year project which will combine existing datasets with new information collected using mental health surveys, individual interviews and focus groups to map the mental health condition and pressures on older adults in Colombia, suffering from decades of conflict and now COVID-19.

Leading the project from the UK will be ARC NWC’s Research Fellow Dr Clarissa Giebel. She said: “”This study is an amazing opportunity to strengthen our links between Liverpool and Medellin in Colombia, and to take learning from how older adults’ mental health can be impacted upon in an LMIC (Low-to-Middle-Income Countries) setting and apply that to the UK and other countries. By looking outside the North West Coast region and a completely different cultural settings, we can hopefully develop better mental health promotion for older adults not just in Colombia, but further afield.”

Once the evidence has been gathered, phase two of the project will see a community-based psychosocial care strategy and intervention co-designed and tested with older residents of the city of Turbo, Colombia, aimed at reducing and managing mental health problems.

Colombia has suffered political violence since the 1950s notably ‘La Violencia’, and more recently violence linked to drug cartels. This has had a serious impact on the nation’s mental health, and compounding these effects, Colombians are now being affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic. It remains unclear how these events are affecting residents’ mental health and wellbeing, particularly older adults.