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

Yes / 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. / UK Prevention Research Partnership (MR/S037527/1), which is funded by the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Health and Social Care Research and Development Division (Welsh Government), Medical Research Council, National Institute for Health Research, Natural Environment Research Council, Public Health Agency (Northern Ireland), The Health Foundation and Wellcome.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/18208
Date28 November 2020
CreatorsWright, J., Hayward, A., West, Jane, Pickett, K., McEachan, Rosemary, Mon-Williams, M., Christie, N., Vaughan, L., Sheringham, J., Haklay, M., Sheard, L., Dickerson, J., Barber, S., Small, Neil A., Cookson, R., Garnett, P., Bywater, T., Pleace, N., Brunner, E.J., Cameron, C., Ucci, M., Cummins, S., Fancourt, D., Kandt, J., Longley, P., Morris, S., Ploubidis, G., Savage, R., Aldridge, R., Hopewell, D., Yang, T., Mason, D., Santorelli, G., Romano, R., Bryant, M., Crosby, L., Sheldon, T.
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Published version
Rights(c) 2019 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons CC-BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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