Institutional practices, community action, and individual resistance: Understanding the mechanisms generating LGBTQ+ health inequities

This Discovery project establishes a bold vision for investigating and addressing LGBTQ+ health inequities. There are very few, if any, health outcomes where LGBTQ+ inequities are not substantial and entrenched across the lifecourse. Existing theories suggest why health inequities occur, but research documenting mechanistic processes is lacking. This gap results from a heightened focus on individual-level processes that overlook the multi-level mechanisms leading to poor LGBTQ+ health. To address this gap there is an urgent need for approaches that bring together data and insights within and across different levels (institutional, community, individual) to generate robust evidence that identifies how to address LGBTQ+ health inequities. This project meets this need by galvanising interdisciplinary, multi-methods, and inter-sectoral expertise to: 1) investigate how UK institutions structure LGBTQ+ health inequities; 2) explore how community initiatives mitigate or further exacerbate institutional practices; and 3) establish how institutional, community, and individual-level processes result in LGBTQ+ health inequalities across the lifecourse. Bringing together an innovative combination of substantive, experiential and methodological expertise across sectors and academic disciplines, the project will develop new theoretical and methodological frameworks to forge a transformative, systematic multi-level approach to investigate and address LGBTQ+ health inequalities.