Professor Sarah Rodgers, Lead of the ARC NWC’s Care and Health Informatics Theme (pictured, left), will be a key team member of a new collaboration to deliver a 4-year project that aims to better understand what makes places healthy and help prevent the development of illnesses. Significantly, it will invite the local community to contribute to the study that explores how the local environment impacts on health and wellbeing.

Called Healthy Urban Places, the project is funded by UKRI’s Population Health Improvement UK (PHI-UK) initiative, awarding more than £8m to Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Liverpool, and other organisations, to deliver the project by working with partners in two major northern cities – Bradford and Liverpool.
Many illnesses such as depression, respiratory and other chronic diseases can be slowed or even prevented by a supportive local environment. Healthy Urban Places investigates how and why health is affected by the quality of our local environments, looking at housing and air quality, access to parks, public transport, schools, and health services etc. Its aim will be to inform and influence policy makers on decisions that improve local places for health, particularly for those who need them the most. In Liverpool and Bradford, the respective Mayors support the project.

Professor Rodgers said: “Everyone should have access to the right environments to support their health and wellbeing. The Healthy Urban Places project builds on our systems expertise at the University of Liverpool. Focusing on a whole systems approach to
perspective of staff working for the organisation. In this online lunchtime workshop, Tracy Hopkins, the CEO of Citizens Advice Blackpool, Conal Land, the Research and Campaigns Officer, and Helen Gwilliam, the Research and Campaigns Assistant, are going to share what their staff have told them. This workshop will provide a platform for this research to be shared and discussed.

The workshop is for anyone who wants to understand better how the cost-of-living crisis is impacting on health and wellbeing in the North West region and show how the wider determinants of health are being exacerbated in the current economic climate.