ActEarly

A City Collaboratory approach to early promotion of good health and wellbeing

UKPRP award £6.5 million for 5 years, with additional in-kind investment from the consortium’s partners

ActEarly aims to improve the life chances of children by focusing on improving the environments that influence their health.

Image provided by Born in Bradford

Professor John Wright

Director of Research, Bradford Institute for Health Research

Bradford Institute for Health Research

John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist with a background in hospital medicine and public health in the UK and in Africa. He established and leads the Bradford Institute for Health Research and Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, working to speed up translation of medical research into practice and policy. In 2007 he set up the Born in Bradford (BiB) cohort study to follow the lives of over 13,000 families as their children grow up. Evidence from BiB has had national and international impact and provided a catalyst for the development of Bradford as a City of Research. He has worked to develop sustainable public health programmes in Africa for over 25 years and in 2015 was awarded the West Africa medal by the Prime Minister for his work in the Ebola epidemic.

Professor Trevor Sheldon

Professor of Health Services Research

Queen Mary University of London

Trevor Sheldon is Professor of Health Services Research in the Institute of Population Health Sciences, Queen Mary University of London and Research Mentor at the Bradford Institute of Health Research. His research interests include: analysis of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of healthcare, public health and policy interventions, patient safety, inequalities in health, and public sector resource allocation. He established the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York where he was also health of Department of Health Sciences and later Deputy Vice-Chancellor and then Dean of the Hull York Medical School. He also works with a partnership between the King’s Fund and the University of York, supporting policy making by providing fast, responsive analysis for the Department of Health and Social Care.

Our research

ActEarly aims to improve the life chances of children by focusing on improving the environments that influence their health. Three themes will be examined: (i) on healthy places, considering the environments in which children live and attend school, and examining how these could increase physical activity, reduce obesity, and improve mental wellbeing, for example; (ii) healthy learning, focussing on how learning is linked to place and community interactions that facilitate learning; and (iii) healthy livelihoods, considering what is good for children’s learning and social engagement. The research will extend the applicant’s work in Bradford and include Tower Hamlets in London, two ethnically diverse areas of the UK with high levels of child poverty. The two sites are intended to enable testing of the replicability of research approaches and generalisability of interventions.

The consortium’s overall approach is to evaluate the cumulative effect of multiple system-wide interventions on improving children health. Co-production of interventions with users and local communities will be informed by evidence synthesis and will follow citizen science methods and asset-based community development approaches. Policy simulation modelling will be conducted to assess the long-term impacts of interventions, and data sources include longitudinal data from the Born in Bradford cohort.

On 25 September 2019 the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) held a kick off meeting with award holders from the first funding round. Download the slides presented by ActEarly (PPT, 3MB)..

Consortium members

ActEarly’s membership includes:

co-investigators with varied expertise, including in simulation modelling, informatics, and social and housing policy.
users from Bradford Metropolitan District Council, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, the Local Government Association (LGA), Public Health England (PHE) and Sport England.
charities and Non-Governmental Organisations such as Bromley by Bow Centre and Nesta.

For further details see the ActEarly website.