In Kent and Medway, a new collaborative is bringing together local councils, health services, businesses, and young people themselves to redesign how the region supports 18-to-24-year-olds into stable employment. This matters because 12.5% of UK youth aged 16–24 are not in education, employment, or training, and Kent and Medway’s youth unemployment rate of 5.5% sits above the national average. Chronic health conditions and inadequate disability accommodations further block young people from finding and keeping meaningful work. The project directly addresses a gap: existing national frameworks like Get Britain Working lack the local, co-produced evidence needed to design interventions that actually work for this specific region and its young people. If successful, the HOPES Collaborative will produce system maps, intervention insights, and research priorities co-created with community partners. These outputs will feed directly into regional policy—the local Get Britain Working Plan, the Work & Health Strategy for Kent and Medway, and the Economic Framework Local Growth Plan. The findings will also underpin a bid for a three-year Regional Consortium, aiming to build lasting cross-sector partnerships that embed research into practice. The ultimate change would be a region where work becomes a genuine route to better health, not a barrier to it.
View original technical description
Background: The relationship between work and health is a public health matter. Employment access and retention, working conditions, job security and satisfaction, and income constitute social determinants of health that influence material resources, psychosocial stressors, and long-term well-being. Across the UK, 12.5% of UK youth aged 16–24 are not in education, employment or training (NEET). Kent and Medway s youth unemployment rate of 5.5% is slightly above the national average. Chronic physical and mental health conditions and inadequate disability accommodations further impede young people s entry into and retention of meaningful work. Within Get Britain Working national framework, local government and stakeholders, like the Kent and Medway Strategic Partnership for Health and Economy and the Work and Health Core Group, are addressing context-specific implications and challenges. Objective: Developed with Kent County Council, Medway Council, Kent and Medway ICB, and multiple stakeholders, the Health of Our young People for Employment Success (HOPES) Collaborative for Kent and Medway uses an interdisciplinary approach to strengthen partnerships among local decision-makers, community partners working with 18-24-year-olds, practitioners, business owners/leaders, and researchers to identify, define, prioritise, and develop interventions and research agendas that support work and health outcomes for young people in the region. Methods: We involve community partners and wider stakeholder group in co-production of: 1) system networked maps of regional work and health programmes, actors and policies, 2) interventions insights from rapid realist review of community case studies, 3) priorities for research with young people, and 4) data inventories and gaps analysis. Employing mixed-methods design encompassing an integrated suite of mapping (stakeholder and social network analysis, systems mapping), creative engagement (graphic elicitation, photovoice, role play, appreciative inquiry, design thinking), prioritisation (Delphi method, prioritisation analysis) and qualitative (thematic analysis, SWOT, rapid realist review) techniques, our approach identifies, conceptualises, prioritises, and addresses barriers to work faced by 18–24-year-olds (especially those with chronic or disabling conditions), fostering system-wide collaboration and synergy in research and intervention design for this population group. Expected outcomes: The Hopes Collaborative provides processes, tools, and resources to strengthen sustainable cross-sector partnerships linking research, policy and practice to improve work as a social determinant of health for youth aged 18-24 in the region. Co-created knowledge and findings will directly inform regional policy processes, aligning with the locally adapted Get Britain Working Plan, the Work & Health Strategy for Kent and Medway (and its Implementation Plan, as well as the Kent and Medway Economic Framework Local Growth Plan (undern development) through the multistakeholder platform and diverse representation on the HOPES Collaborative as well as with community partners as co-owners of the process and findings. Findings also underpin the co-design of a three-year HOPES Regional Consortium, targeting funding through NIHR's Work and Health Research Collaboration competition in Spring 2026. This will also aim to include additional stakeholders and higher education institutions for long-term collaboration to strengthen research capacity for research production and use to enhance work-health outcomes for 18–24-year-olds in Kent and Medway whilst connecting with research networks working across the UK.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know