ActEarly – outline paper published

ActEarly is a new project, which has started in September. The project is a 5 years “city collaboratory” in Bradford and Tower Hamlets to research early promotion of good health and wellbeing. The project is part of a set of projects that are funded under the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) scheme, which includes an alliance of funders, including multiple research councils, charities, and government bodies. The consortium that is involved in ActEarly is quite extensive, and the framework of the project and explanation of what it is aiming to achieve is now published in an open-access paper.

 

ActEarly includes an explicit participatory element, and citizen science is an integral part of the research. You can find out more in the paper.

The paper abstract is: 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.

You can access the paper here.

You can also see the role of citizen science and community engagement in the logic model of the project: