Spotlight on Jessica Veltman, Population Health Hub Programme Manager

What is the City and Hackney Population Health Hub?

The City and Hackney Population Health Hub aims to support the City and Hackney Place-Based Partnership and wider system partners to reduce health inequalities and improve the health of our population. Rather than seeing these areas as the remit of certain teams, such as the Public Health Team, the Hub aims to support partners from across the system to take action on prevention, health equity and population health. We’re a small team that works to proactively identify what the system needs and we also work in partnership on requests for support from stakeholders across the system.

Why is it important for organisations like City and Hackney and UCL to collaborate?

Each partner brings unique knowledge, skills, and experience to the table and working together helps us to have a more comprehensive understanding of complex problems and how we might tackle these.

Through my placement, I’ve had the opportunity to attend training courses on research methods and work within a team of researchers over a six month period. This exposure has given be a much better understanding of the research landscape and supported the development of new partnerships and skills which I can apply to my own work.

I’ve developed a much better understanding of the relationship between housing and health and the opportunities for reducing inequalities in this area. I’ve been able to take this learning back to my team and explore how we might apply these locally. 

I hope that I’ve also been able to contribute to the work of colleagues at UCL by providing a different perspective and local insight.    

Tell us about your research placement with UCL – what did it involve?

My placement has involved supporting a programme of research, led by Jessica Sheringham, called DASHH (Data sharing for Housing and Health). The research seeks to understand how sharing information responsibly between housing and health services could be used to benefit residents or patients and reduce health inequalities. It’s a mixed methods study which aims to develop a shared understanding across all parts of an integrated care system (ICS) of how and why health and housing data should be shared. I have been involved in identifying who to interview, developing topic guides and vignettes for interviews and carrying out interviews. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet other researchers in the Department of Primary Care and Population Health and learn about the work that they’re doing.

What inspired your interest in health inequalities?

I’ve always thought about health inequalities, the wider determinants of health and the injustice that people and communities experience. My personal experiences have also influenced my relationship with the work that I do. When I was doing my MSc in Public Health my dad was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and died shortly after. He was 61. He worked as a builder, he smoked and his childhood wasn’t an easy one. 
This very personal experience reflected what I was learning about in my MSc about the determinants of health and has shaped the way that I think about health inequalities. I’m sure a lot of people have experiences like this. After I graduated I worked in the VCS for a number of years. We ran lots of great projects but a lot of the issues that people were experiencing were things we couldn’t do anything about. This led to my decision to move into a Public Health role in a Local Authority.

Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of your to-do list?

The eMbedding heAlth equiTy in City and Hackney (MATCH) programme has been developed as a tool to engage with system partners about health inequalities and population health, and to support our workforce to embed a health equity approach.

After discussion with system partners, we noticed that although there was a strong commitment to health inequalities in principle across the system, in practice many people felt they didn’t know where to start.

The MATCH programme aims to address this gap by supporting teams and services across City & Hackney to embed health equity in their day-to-day work. We have developed an approach and a package of training, peer learning and support to help partners to do this.

Programme participants identify specific health inequalities to focus on which are relevant to their work and, as part of the MATCH approach, identify areas for change. 
 

Links

• Public Health, Health Determinants and Inequalities research group
• City and Hackney Population Health Hub