Dr Helen Pineo speaks at Design Council roundtable on Health and Wellbeing

Improving health and wellbeing and reducing health inequalities is one of the Design Council’s three strategic priorities. To help identify where they should best act in this area they held a roundtable event of influential sector leaders in July. The roundtable session had two aims: firstly, to highlight how design is currently being used; and secondly, to share best-practice initiatives to explore collectively how design can be used to address wider determinants of health and wellbeing.

Dr Pineo attended to showcase her new THRIVES framework. THRIVES stands for ‘Towards Healthy uRbanism: InclusiVe Equitable Sustainable’, its aim is to raise the importance of environmental degradation and structural barriers to health in urban policy and development. A write-up of the framework features in the ‘Health and Wellbeing Roundtable Summary’ report (page 8).

The roundtable participants noted that Covid-19 has highlighted and exacerbated the disproportionate negative health impact of the built environment on low income and minority ethnic communities. For instance, Dr Pineo spoke about the links between household overcrowding and air pollution exposure and the rate of infection or death from Covid-19 in these communities. The THRIVES framework calls for built environment professionals to adopt an equity and inclusion lens in their work to design out these burdens.  

Dr Pineo has also been quoted in the Design Council’s new Design Perspectives report published in August, which explores where design can be used to address the wider determinants of health and wellbeing as they are currently being experienced in the UK.

Further information

• View Dr Helen Pineo’s profile
• Read more about the new THRIVES framework
• Find out more about the Design Council’s Health and Wellbeing roundtable
• Read the Design Council report ‘Design Perspectives: Health and Wellbeing’

Image credit: Michel Rossier on Unsplash