Health
Health is the foundation upon which individuals, families and communities thrive. It's a broad concept, including physical, mental and emotional dimensions, life satisfaction and social participation.
It also includes the ability to adapt to internal and external sources of stress or problems. Not everyone has an equal share of the resources and environments that promote health. Many people live with financial difficulty, inadequate housing, discrimination, marginalisation which may cause or exacerbate health problems, and which can intersect to make health difficult or even impossible. These problems can be improved, ignored or made worse by government policies and the services and support that are available.
Health runs throughout much of our work in the UCL Social Research Institute and we have epidemiologists, demographers, psychologists, sociologists and economists working on health research. All our work has a strong focus on how health differs across geography and populations and when these differences are avoidable, unfair and systematic. In other words, when they represent health inequalities.
Research for health policy
We work closely with national and local policy makers to inform health policy as well as other policy relevant to health including early years, school education and children’s social care. Our department leads and co-leads programmes of work specifically funded for knowledge exchange with health policy colleagues in government and responds to requests from the Department of Health and Social Care in England: the NIHR Policy Reviews Facility, the NIHR Children and Families Policy Research Unit and NIHR evidence synthesis groups LACES and BUCKLES.
Driven by the latest machine learning software, we’ve created policy-facing living maps of research addressing inequalities in primary care. Other examples of our policy-facing outputs include evidence toolkits (EPPI-Vis) about interventions preventing violence against women and girls.
Health research across the life-course (birth cohort studies)
The Centre for Longitudinal Studies is home to a unique series of UK national cohort studies which collect health-related data on large nationally representative groups of people from their earliest years, across childhood, into adulthood and in some cases into older age. These studies are designed to understand the complex bio-social interplay between the physical and social environment across the life-course. There is a huge body of research using this data, much of which investigates the determinants of physical and mental health and how health is related to other aspects of our lives – such as labour market participation, partnership stability and social isolation.
Children and families
Children and young people need healthy parents, households, and communities, as well as health-promoting schools and wider services. Much of our work investigates how services across health, education, early help, children’s social care, and the voluntary sector can support children, young people and families to lead full and healthy lives. This includes research on children’s consent to healthcare and shared decision making; the children’s workforce and the transition to motherhood. We have particular expertise in the early years of children’s lives, particularly on healthy places, families facing adversities, services for child and family health and our capacity building for child and family health research.
Mental health
We conduct research on mental health using our birth cohort studies, for example on young people’s mental health and have a stream of work on young people’s mental health and subjective wellbeing.
Climate change and health
An emerging area of our health research relates to climate change. We have a cross-disciplinary hub on climate change which includes the impacts on health and wellbeing. We are part of a large study which uses artificial intelligence to create new digital tools for speeding up evidence-gathering on climate and health for policy-makers: the DESTINY study.
Discrimination, disadvantage, adversity and health
We conduct research about the health of people from minoritised groups, for example the CICADA study investigated how discrimination and disadvantage intersect to affect daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have a body of work on improving support for victims of domestic abuse and on the health and wellbeing of children and parents in contact with the children’s social care system.
Pioneering methods for health research
We are home to leading experts on methods for longitudinal surveys, the future of AI in scientific research, evidence synthesis for health policy (including routine consideration of health equity) participatory and creative health research and use of diary studies to collect data on health behaviours. We also use creative, arts-based approaches, for example our study on knowledge exchange/ translation of research on domestic abuse.
Research project
