Understanding and Improving Health within Settings and Organisations

In our day-to-day lives, different organisations and settings (such as schools and workplaces) shape our life chances and the kinds of physical and social environments that we are exposed to. These affect our behaviour and they also play an important part in shaping how we see ourselves, and how other people see us. We want to understand these social processes better so that we can develop new interventions to improve people’s health and well-being. We then want to do careful scientific studies that tell us whether these interventions work. We will check too whether these attract and help the people who can benefit most (for example, men or women, or people from less advantaged backgrounds). We will work in some settings that almost everyone has some experience of in their lives (such as primary and secondary schools, and workplaces) and in other settings (such as prisons) where there is a chance to develop and assess interventions for people who are often very difficult to reach. We will also try to think of new ways to make health improvement programmes available to people and enjoyable for them. To do this we will work in settings such as professional sports clubs (for example, professional football or rugby clubs) that are familiar or especially attractive to the people that the programme is designed for.