ActEarly: a City Collaboratory approach to early promotion of good health and wellbeing

Abstract

Economic, physical, built, cultural, learning, social and service environments have a profound effect on lifelong health. However, policy thinking about health research is dominated by the ‘biomedical model’ which promotes medicalisation and an emphasis on diagnosis and treatment at the expense of prevention. Prevention research has tended to focus on ‘downstream’ interventions that rely on individual behaviour change, frequently increasing inequalities. Preventive strategies often focus on isolated leverage points and are scattered across different settings. This paper describes a major new prevention research programme that aims to create City Collaboratory testbeds to support the identification, implementation and evaluation of upstream interventions within a whole system city setting. Prevention of physical and mental ill-health will come from the cumulative effect of multiple system-wide interventions. Rather than scatter these interventions across many settings and evaluate single outcomes, we will test their collective impact across multiple outcomes with the goal of achieving a tipping point for better health. Our focus is on early life (ActEarly) in recognition of childhood and adolescence being such critical periods for influencing lifelong health and wellbeing.

Measuring the Built Environment in Studies of Child Health—A Meta-Narrative Review of Associations

“…The authors of this review are part of the Healthy Places stream of the ActEarly consortium, which is investigating the impact of interventions in the built environment (BE) on child health [25]. A.O.-S., L.V., and R.M.…”

Twin epidemics of covid-19 and non-communicable disease

“…Prevention strategies and research have focused on downstream interventions that rely on influencing individual behaviours, an approach that widens health inequalities. Interventions should instead target whole systems such as health, education, local government, and communities to tackle the underlying social economic and environmental causes of ill health 8…”

The Born in Bradford COVID-19 Research Study: Protocol for an adaptive mixed methods research study to gather actionable intelligence on the impact of COVID-19 on health inequalities amongst families living in Bradford

“…The C-SAG also benefits from the recently formed UK Prevention Research Partnership ActEarly consortium 13 . Working in close partnership with Born in Bradford, ActEarly focusses on early life changes to improve the health and opportunities for children living in two contrasting areas with high levels of child poverty; Bradford, West Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets, London.…”

“…Co-production of research priorities with communities and decision makers underpins the entirety of our adaptive research activities. Our approach to co-production is based on our Act Early ‘city collaboratory’ approach 13 , and will be used in the short term to identify key research priorities and knowledge gaps, and in the longer term to co-produce interventions and initiatives to mitigate poor outcomes and health inequalities. In order to develop acceptable and feasible initiatives that have the best chance of success, we need to ensure equality and engagement of communities, stakeholders/decision makers and researchers.…”