Current Research

Progressing the public health agenda: ethnicity and migration

Professor Yoav Ben-Shlomo is part of a team looking at ethnicity and migration within applied public health and health inequalities research.

Public health evidence and practice should reflect the needs of the diverse population of England. This project's goal is to begin to redress the marginalisation of race/ethnicity and migration within public health intervention and health inequalities research. Further details are available here on the NIHR SPHR website.

Stop smoking support services for people with recognised mental health problems

Professor Yoav Ben-Shlomo is also involved in research to evaluate smoking cessation in people who have depression or severe mental illness. It will assess rates of smoking cessation support and number of sucessful or unsuccessful attempts to quit smoking. The team hope to provide valuable information on the adequacy of smoking cessation support in primary care for this group of smokers. Further details are available here on the NIHR SPHR website.

Complex systems approach to evaluating public health interventions

This project looks at public health interventions and behavioural trends in complex systems. The researchers will build on previous NIHR SPHR research to analyse public health policy from a complex systems perspective. It will use the complex system of the drivers of alcohol consumption as a case study, and explore applications to other areas of behaviour.

The team say that particular attention will be given to the potential for advanced and emerging quantitative techniques (e.g. agent-based modelling, machine learning) to contribute to public health analysis of complex systems.

Further details are available here on the NIHR SPHR website.

Developing a systems perspective for the evaluation of local public health interventions

This project looks at the mismatch bewteen public health evaluations by researchers and the experiemces of local practitioners working in the public sector. The researchers say there is a need for "a new way of researching the kinds of activities that take place in the public and third sector". Their project takes a complex systems perspective to describe how interventions can be more or less feasible and effective.

Further details are available here on the NIHR SPHR website.

The CVI Project

Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI) refers to impairment of vision due to malfunction of the brain, rather than the eyes. CVI is a feature of many neurodevelopmental conditions, affects an estimated 1% of children and results in learning, co-ordination and communication difficulties.

Descriptive studies report that simplifying visual input improves performance in children with CVI but robust data are lacking. CVI is often unrecognised as many affected children have good visual acuity and appear to “see” normally.

In a program of work (the CVI Project) funded by NIHR, Cathy Williams and colleagues have been developing and evaluating a complex intervention, involving school and hospital components, for children with CVI. The first phase of research comprises a cross-sectional survey of 11 mainstream primary schools and 1 special primary school to estimate the prevalence of children in Years 1-6 with CVI and the most sensitive “red flags” that could identify them. This first study is nearing completion. During 2018 the team will be developing a Core Outcome set (COS) for children with CVI. The final phase of this programme in 2019-2020 will be a feasibility cluster randomised controlled trial to evaluate an intervention programme aimed at helping children with CVI.

For more information on The CVI Project and my ongoing research in the field of Complex Visual Impairment: www.bristol.ac.uk/ccah/research/childdevelopmentdisability/complex-visual-impairment/
http://www.thecviproject.co.uk/

 

Completed Research

Inequitable access to preventive and therapeutic health interventions for older people

This was a joint project with researchers at Universities of Bristol (Yoav Ben-Shlomo), Newcastle (Martin White, Jean Adams), Sheffield (Nick Payne, Sarah Salway), UCL (Kate Walters), and Cambridge (Louise Lafortune, Stefanie Buckner).

The overall aim was to develop a conceptual process that can be pragmatically implemented to identify whether preventive and therapeutic health interventions that may benefit older populations are delivered equitably, and the impact of any inequitable access on intervention-generated inequalities (IGIs) in health outcomes.

The work package had five objectives:

1. Developing a theoretical model to guide the work
2. Identifying a range of interventions that are amenable to detailed study
3. Investigating whether intervention pathways generate inequalities
4. Exploring why such inequalities arise
5. Exploring the potential to intervene to reduce such inequalities.

To achieve these objectives we will undertake systematic reviews, secondary analysis of routine datasets, and primary qualitative and quantitative research, using a mixed methods and multi-disciplinary approach.

This project was funded by the NIHR SPHR. Further details are available here on the NIHR SPHR website.

Modelling cardiovascular disease and dementia in ageing population

This project developed computer models of the value for money of interventions for cardiovascular diseases and dementia, and the impact these interventions on healthcare demand. The researchers created a single model to estimate the impact of different prevention policies, which can be used as a decision support tool to evaluate 'healthy ageing' interventions. Further details are available here on the NIHR SPHR website.