With a collective aim to transform health and care for all, there are unlikely partnerships taking place in Leeds.
Why would an aerospace engineer work with healthcare professionals?
And what brings together children, young people and their families, politicians, world-leading scientists, the local authority and health and care professionals?
These unconventional alignments are becoming increasingly typical in what is the UK’s third largest city. And perhaps that cross-sector, no-holds-barred approach is one of the reasons Leeds is a top UK city for health and care research and innovation.
Healthy Leeds Plan reveals priorities for research
The city’s population health insights, challenges and priorities are set out in The Healthy Leeds Plan.
As a city renowned for its strong culture of cross-sector partnership and collaboration, the Healthy Leeds Plan helps underpin this and takes it to new levels. It is proving a superb tool for academic researchers to understand where their expertise is most needed in helping to solve the hardest health challenges.
While the Healthy Leeds Plan highlights issues which are familiar across the UK and around the world, partners in Leeds have formed unusual collaborations to explore and devise solutions.
Engineering improvements for people with multiple, long-term conditions
One of the Healthy Leeds Plan’s top challenges is tackling the increasing prevalence of people with multiple long-term health conditions. These affect around 14 million people in England, occurring 10 – 15 years earlier for people living in the poorest areas.
It causes them long-term and life-limiting challenges and places a huge and increasing demand on the NHS.
Caring for people with multiple conditions can be challenging due to interactions between different conditions. Care can be fragmented because many services in the NHS have been built around single conditions, doctors train in specialties and research tends to take place on one disease at a time.
People with multiple conditions want joined up, efficient and easy to navigate care, as well as better support for mental wellbeing.
Local health and care services are now better joined up via the Leeds Health and Care Partnership. This partnership approach provides the opportunity to embed research within health and care for the benefit of local populations.
So, in a novel approach with pilot funding from NIHR and EPSRC [1], researchers in Leeds are combining systems design and engineering expertise with data science and insights from the health and care system. This is helping them understand the problems that people living with multiple long-term conditions experience – and how to improve health and care services for them.
Using the city’s data insights, partners are focusing on those with the poorest health outcomes living in the most deprived areas, prioritising effective engagement with them to garner new, rich insights.
As part of the ‘SEISMIC’ project, they are developing a proposal for full-scale research which could inform the potential redesign of complex health and care systems, based on and to better meet people’s overall needs, in Leeds and beyond.
Joining forces to improve health outcomes for children
Leeds is also breaking the mould when it comes to partnership working to transform children and young people’s health and wellbeing – another Healthy Leeds Plan priority.
The city’s ambition is to be the best place for children and young people to grow up. Yet here, a quarter of children are living in poverty.
So, Leeds is spearheading a national campaign to ensure research improves health outcomes for children and young people.
CHORAL (Child Health Outcomes Research at Leeds) is a multi-million-pound research programme, funded by the University of Leeds, Leeds Children’s Hospital (part of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust), and Leeds Hospitals Charity [2].
It brings together clinicians, scientists, policy makers, children, young people and community representatives to better understand how to improve outcomes for children who experience illness.
With a focus on life-threatening childhood diseases such as cancer and mental health conditions, CHORAL is working to influence systemic, institutional and policy changes.
The move comes as new government data is showing that millions of children and young people in the UK are living with serious health and wellbeing problems.
– One in nine children are living with a disability
– One in five children in the UK are living in food poverty
– One in five children entering primary school are living with obesity or overweight.
CHORAL is already helping develop evidence-driven policies to improve the development, commissioning and delivery of the public services that support children.
With Child of the North and Anne Longfield’s Centre for Young Lives think tank, the CHORAL team is co-ordinating a series of evidence-based reports on how to build a better country for all children and young people [3].
Research partnerships at the heart of the ambition
These research collaborations across health, academia, industry, government and local communities in Leeds are forging new ways to tackle what are common, intractable issues. Issues which affect individuals, families, communities, health and care services and the taxpayers who fund them.
Leeds Academic Health Partnership helps bring city partners together to solve some of the hardest health challenges such as these.
Partnership Director Kate Lodge said: “It is the city’s dynamic partnership culture which supports such unconventional research relationships, bringing people together to design the most effective, and sustainable health and care support systems of the future.
“These examples demonstrate the potential of joining up and improving care in ways which is based on evidence about how people live, and want to live, their lives.
“They are part of a vast range of activity by our partners who are working to fulfil a shared ambition to make Leeds the best place in the UK in which to live and work – for everyone.”
Click here to return to the spotlight series, in which we explore groundbreaking activities which set new, exemplary standards in making research everyone’s business for everyone’s benefit, especially for those most in need.
[1] The National Institute for Health and Care Research and The UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
[2] CHORAL is a collaboration which brings together these funding partners and partners from across the health, social and public sectors.
[3] https://www.n8research.org.uk/research-focus/child-of-the-north/2024-campaign/
Header image credit: iStock.com/vizerskaya
Sideline image (1) credit: iStock.com/Khanchit Khirisutchalual
Sideline image (2) credit: iStock.com/gpointstudio
Sideline image (3) credit: iStock.com/MicroStockHub
