A person's chances of living a long and healthy life in the UK still depend heavily on their income, and that gap is growing wider. This matters because life expectancy gains have stalled, and poor health prevents many people from working, participating in society, and enjoying wellbeing. The core problem is that current solutions focus too narrowly on individual behaviours, operate on short political timelines, and fail to account for how disadvantages like gender, ethnicity, and disability overlap and accumulate over a lifetime. The Equalise Centre brings together academics, charities, and policymakers to generate actionable insights that address the upstream social and economic drivers of ill health. If successful, the centre could shift public health strategy from short-term, individual-focused interventions toward coordinated policies on learning, work, and care that reduce inequality across the entire lifecourse. This would mean fewer people entering old age with preventable chronic conditions, and a more productive, inclusive society where health no longer determines life chances.
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Marked health inequalities exist in the UK and the gap between the richest and poorest has widened, despite the UK leading the way in health inequalities research. Consequently, gains in life expectancy have stalled and poor health restricts social participation, productivity and wellbeing for many people. Prevention and tackling the root causes (upstream social and economic drivers) is more cost-effective and ethical than curing illness once it has occurred. Yet, solutions have been hampered by short-term planning horizons, interventions focused only on individual behaviours (such as health behaviours) whose benefits are short-lived, and approaches that fail to address intersecting dimensions of inequality where people experience disadvantage across multiple dimensions (e.g. gender, ethnicity, disability) at the same time. Equalise brings together partners with a wide range of disciplinary and methodological expertise across academic and third sector organisations, as well as policy makers at national, regional and local levels to address the challenge of health inequalities from an interdisciplinary, multisectoral, mixed methods (combining qualitative and quantitative methods) lifecourse perspective. A lifecourse perspective is important because disadvantages tend to accumulate over time and there are likely to be important periods of the lifecourse where interventions work best. Our research questions and approach derive from a process of co-production which will remain at the heart of all centre activities. They are focused on achieving our overarching aim of generating actionable insights to redress health inequalities. This aim will be achieved by meeting five objectives to: 1. deliver a scientific programme generating solutions in relation to three horizontal themes: learning, work, and care; and two cross cutting themes on place, and the synthesis of findings across the programme. 2. maximize impact through close partnerships with communities, third sector organisations and government departments at national, devolved and local levels. 3. develop a next generation of researchers with skills in mixed methods approaches to combine insights from quantitative analysis of longitudinal survey, administrative and synthetic data with qualitative insights. 4. exploit the wealth of existing and newly available longitudinal, administrative and qualitative data resources (including UKRI investments). 5. build support for, and awareness of, the Centre's evidence-based solutions by bringing our extensive network of local, national and international collaborators, policy stakeholders and community members into dialogue around viable policies and actions.
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