Professor Rhiannon Corcoran

There is nothing more important for academics to address than societal injustice. That is why mainstreaming health equity must define the work we do in ARC NWC.

Our little area of the world is beset by inequalities. They stare us in the face – from the faded elegance of our coastal communities no longer enjoying Victorian heydays, to the trampled suburbs of our towns and cities that play final fiddle behind greedy central commerce areas.

Places that are not obvious destinations of choice any more. Instead, likely to be bypassed as we head our ways towards opportunity. Here we have lots of places grimly hanging on to the strings of a purse as it transfigures into a sow’s ear. With people left wanting, tired of asking.

Year in, year out people suffer the consequences of unrequited need in the form of chronic ill-health and despair. If they’re lucky they have close bonds and ties to neighbours, friends and family who, like them, know what it means to go without, to feel the cold and to regularly wonder if it’s all really worth it. The warmth within these bonds is life-saving . But the grind of daily need makes those bonds harder to form and to grasp.

As applied health researchers we should do what we can to help shift to a better every day. We sit with the purse string holders, making decisions about how we ask questions and to whom we ask them. Luxuriously we decide what is worth our time and what is not. Unemotionally figuring out how we allocate the riches we have. Balancing if and when we involve people who have a lived interest in the matters we regard from afar.

This is not a game of monopoly that we play. It is not even a game of strategy and its certainly not rocket science. It’s a professional choice we take to do what we can. NIHR ARC NWC’s health equity mainstreaming ethos is there, sitting on our shoulders, to oversee the choices that we make as we go about our daily activities.

The members of the Community Mental Health & Wellbeing Research Development Network (CMHWRDN) aim to explore, build on and translate into policy the activities and infrastructure that underpins neighbourhood social capital. Importantly we aim to become part of that social capital by tethering the decisions of authorities and ivory towers to the ground so that we know with clarity that we addressing the right stuff. That’s the CMHWRDN’s purpose and we invite you to join us in achieving it.

Come to our meetings and speak about your good stuff, the bonds that hold you together in your place. Share your strengths and your assets so that ARC can use its resources to best effect to spread what works in making better every days in the places of the North West Coast