Plymouth Health Determinants Research Collaboration projects

The Plymouth Health Determinants Research Collaboration team are progressing with funded capacity to support activity which will contribute towards embedding a research culture in Plymouth City Council.

Whilst we work with council teams and community colleagues to develop priority areas our researchers are busy with Council teams to develop ideas, supporting evaluation questions, mentoring and training.

We have been delighted at the response and interest from many Council teams and are now working to determine the next group of project areas.

We have committed dedicated funding to seven projects, which includes researcher capacity, funding to second council staff, bring in academic subject matter expertise and associated costs. Please note some projects are still in development. For more information, please contact the linked researcher.

This research focuses on food insecurity as a health determinants issue.

The aim of this project is to extend the ‘Is Food All We Need?’ research study that we have been working on since July 2022. The study looked at the impact of food-focused initiatives and services in Plymouth, such as food banks, food larders and food clubs, focusing on the perspectives of service users. This second phase will support the establishment of food co-ops and social supermarkets in the city, with the aim of improving access to affordable food, and removing barriers to food security.

We acknowledged that the voices of some communities of identity and potentially marginalised social groups have not been fully included so far in our research, for example BAME communities and refugee and asylum seekers, young people (16-24 years old), older people (over 60 years old), people with disabilities, people with mental health difficulties, and people from the LGBTQ+ community in Plymouth. We anticipate that people in these communities are likely to experience additional barriers to food security, and this contributes to health inequalities.

The policy team are part of the Executive Office and responsible for interpreting government policy and steering how it will impact on council work and the people of Plymouth. They work with city-wide data and intelligence functions, and hold a number of statutory responsibility duties for the council. As well as implementing existing government policy they also horizon scan for possible emerging policy conduct local survey and consultation, and lobby government in relation to planned or suggested changes (e.g. https://keycities.uk/).

Many different parts of the Council hold their own data and intelligence and the policy team often find themselves cascading and sourcing data and share information efficiently and effectively. Key data holders are public health, capacity and planning, performance, economic development as well as each directorate and service holding their own data: but all teams access and use city level data, often used and interpreted differently.

The HDRC is funding a secondment to work across the council to make better use of our data, ensuring we know what is available, where it is stored, how it is accessed and consider how it can be used to help inform priorities for the city. It will be the opportunity to test how data can be used to create a better picture of our strengths and needs by joining up knowledge looking for synergy, trends and greater granularity.

The public health team were involved in early pilot work at the beginning of COVID by Street Services exploring through qualitative appreciative enquiry the mental health benefits of nature-based experiences on children and young people and their parents at PCC’s Poole Farm. This has provided an initial evidence base to help secure Youth Investment Funding (YIF), to support this two-year ecotherapy pilot, the first of a collaboration between Livewell, the Environmental Planning team (Street Services, Place Directorate), Youth Services (Community Connections, People Directorate), and other partners.

The plan will be to evaluate the experiences of young people (11-24) invited to a six-week group-based course in one or other of the environments. The interventions will be co-designed with the young people and their parents and carers. The intention is to evidence the mechanisms of impact of nature-connectedness (often known as green and blue prescribing) for Children and young people and their parents/network and carers. This sits within wider ambitions of the City to build places for families to be in nature, and to develop its natural assets through investment in the National Marine Park, working with the National Trust etc.

Introducing the Health Determinants Research collaboration to Plymouth has meant the development of a partnership between the council and the University and other partners such as POP – our community partner.

In setting up the collaboration and thinking about some of the core objectives we are not here just to ‘do’ research but to think carefully about how we encourage council colleagues and partners to be involved in research and evaluation and offer the skills and knowledge to be able to factor this into everyday work.

We have hit a number of practical challenges which need resolving, for example our terms and conditions of service don’t factor in skills and competency around research, we need contractual arrangements for colleagues from other organisations to work with us, keeping our clients and information safe.

Research and learning can support the development of the council culture, examples include the use of appreciative enquiry as a technique, which can help in understanding the core issues which might be impacting on people and might be leading to sickness, or employment attrition. Understanding different solutions can help in shaping our recruitment practices to encourage a more diverse workforce. Funding has been offered for an additional HR manager to support development in a wide range of areas.