Developing a Health Determinants Research Collaboration in Wakefield Council

People living in Wakefield can expect to live shorter lives than people living elsewhere in the UK, and will spend less of that lifetime in good health. We believe that our HDRC can help change this by developing capacity for research into the determinants of health and wellbeing, leading to better and more evidence-informed decisions and a reduction in health inequalities. Our vision for Wakefield’s Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) is to understand what affects health and wellbeing in Wakefield District, by creating a pipeline of varied, high quality research and insight, co-produced with our communities. We want to mobilise that understanding, creating better decisions, policies and actions that will ‘add years to life and life to years’ for Wakefield citizens. Our lead academic partner is Leeds Beckett University, led by Professor James Woodall. Professor Chris Dayson and Nadia Bashir from Sheffield Hallam University support our Community Insight workstream. Embedded research will be key to the delivery of our HDRC and we will have three ER Fellows employed in LBU but integrated into Wakefield Council teams. Wakefield’s HDRC will have three work streams: Core Capacity, Knowledge Translation and Behaviour Change, and Community Insight. Our Core Capacity workstream will create a research development and governance function in the Council, supporting all aspects of the research process from initial ideas, to design, governance and ethics, to application for external funding bids. We will also have a training and skills development offer for staff working at all levels of the Council and local VCSE organisations. Our Knowledge Translation and Behaviour Change workstream will work with teams and services across the Council to turn the evidence we generate into effective decisions, actions and policies. A key focus of this workstream will be a project with elected members, exploring ways to integrate research evidence into their decision making and scrutiny processes more effectively. Our Community Insight workstream will build a sustainable model for co-producing all aspects of research with local communities, supporting local people to become participants in research, and leaders and champions of it. This will build on important work such as our ‘Big Conversation’ in summer 2022, and the development of community researcher and journalist roles. We will support underserved communities to be ‘Research Ready’, and will co-produce our research priorities with local people. A further key focus will be the development of a community / peer researcher development model, based on the work of Professor Dayson and Nadia Bashir. We will deliver twice yearly training to cohorts recruited from communities with lived experience of health inequalities. We will design an evaluation framework for the HDRC, and report on progress against it to the Corporate Management Team, Cabinet and Wakefield Health and Wellbeing Board. By the end of 5 years we will show that there has been a cultural change within our local authority, with many more staff actively engaged in research, much more research activity within the Council, and more effective decisions being taken based on the evidence we produce. Above all, the research we do will have been co-produced with local communities, and we will demonstrate that increased research activity has improved health and wellbeing and reduced inequalities.