Our Interests: Health and Wellbeing

We are interested in health from the perspective of cause rather than cure.  We have no expertise in medicine and operations, but can bring skills and experience to issues of health inequality and the ‘social model’ of health.  At its simplest, health and wellbeing are affected by many of the areas that we work on – like housing; community safety; community coherence; and equality.

We carried out an evaluation of the lessons learned in the eight Equally Well Test Sites.  This work is described in a case study and our report has not been published.

We worked with the Alcohol and Drugs partnership in Lanarkshire to scope the impact of drugs and alcohol on the minority ethnic community.  This was the first time that this type of work had been carried out in Scotland.  This involved depth interviews with service providers and community organisations and interviews and small focus groups with people from the minority ethnic communities.    We concentrated on three of the larger communities – the Pakistani, Polish and Chinese communities.  Our report had recommendations for the partnership about service provision and promotion; culturally aware services; and engagement of communities.

We also reviewed mental health services in North East Fife.  This involved:

• comparing data on mental health for Scotland, Fife and North East Fife;
• interviewing a wide range of public and voluntary sector service providers;
• holding focus groups with service users and with carers; and
• reporting and making recommendations on improvements that could be made to the present services.