Overview
The ADR Wales Health and Well-being programme brings together geospatial, health and administrative data to provide insights into health and well-being in Wales.
This programme of work aims to provide insights into various aspects of the health and well-being of the Welsh population.
Recent work includes examining relationships between living alone and loneliness; providing evidence on individual and household level travel distances to health services in rural areas; providing demographic breakdowns of individuals living in Houses of Multiple Occupation in Wales; and investigating data linkage between the 2021 Census and the Welsh Demographic Service dataset in the SAIL Databank.
Going forward the theme will concentrate on the feasibility of creating a new wellbeing measure using linked health administrative data; investigating rural related health outcomes; and creating a 24-hour workplace exposure linkage method.
Priorities
The enactment of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 outlines Welsh Government’s commitment to the health and well-being of individuals across Wales. Given the wide-ranging nature of this topic we expect work to cut across multiple thematic research areas. Specifically, we have designed our approach to work closely with the climate change and social justice thematic research areas.
We plan numerous methodological projects for use in standalone research projects, but also to make available for wider use. Such projects include the creation of a home environment dataset; workplace linkage feasibility; and development of a well-being measure using routine data.
The home environment dataset involves the creation, combination, and analysis of multiple household factors to create a ‘household stress index’. Physical and environmental characteristics such as housing type, and air pollution exposures (bespoke computer models of the built and natural environments linked at household level) would be combined with social constructs such as family composition, overcrowding, and household comorbidity. Incorporating experiences of all householders would add an extra depth to our research, allowing research to account for household-level stresses within a family home, such as caring responsibilities. This would be used to understand associations with health and well-being, especially within vulnerable groups.
As an enabling project for the climate change thematic research area, we will seek to develop workplace linkage feasibility methodologies. This will facilitate linking and analysis of individual workers’ environmental exposures both at home and at work, potential active travel metrics (e.g. commuting distances), along with health records.
In tandem with our social justice work we will describe the health and wellbeing of vulnerable groups in Wales in terms of relative difficulties compared to the general population, or groups of people at similar life stages. We will provide insights to illustrate vulnerabilities and needs of certain groups relative to the general population, highlighting and promoting the need for support from various agencies.
We will investigate the feasibility of building on existing learnings to create an individual well-being measure aiming to understand population level well-being in Wales using routinely collected data.
Projects
Workplace data linkage
This project aims to create a method to link an individual to their workplace as a pilot study to prove the concept of the method. The research team aim to include, for instance, individuals from the teachers workforce in Wales. Environmental data such as pollution levels at home and at work will be included, as well as the potential for active travel through commuting distances.
General health and wellbeing for groups across Wales
This project will investigate the health and wellbeing of groups to illustrate difficulties and raise awareness for certain groups.
Individual wellbeing measures using routine data
This project will look at how can we harness routinely collected data to measure individual wellbeing. The project will include data relating to the individual, the home environment and area to try to understand and measure wellbeing.
Home environment wellbeing
This project will look at how can we harness routinely collected data to understand the impact of the home environment on an individual’s health and wellbeing, and if this approach be used to improve wider population level research.
Publications
Data Insight: Characteristics of residents living in Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) in Wales
This Data Insight summarises work undertaken within the ADR Wales Health and Care thematic research area to provide demographic insights into residents living in Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) in Wales. The work was initiated following a request from the Welsh Government building safety team to support evidence development for proposed building safety reforms following the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Data Insight: Creating a new indicator to measure population health and healthcare utilisation: The Desirable Health Indicator
This ADR Wales Data Insight details the development of the Desirable Health Indicator using multiple routinely collected administrative and health data sources, and describes its distribution in the Welsh population.
Data Insight: Assessing access to primary care in rural and urban Wales
A collaboration between ADR Wales researchers and Rural Health Care for Wales (RHCW) was formed to conduct a pilot study on inequalities in rural primary healthcare accessibility. The research questions related to distances travelled to General Practice (GP) surgeries in rural areas. Specifically, the questions posed were: (1) do individuals use their nearest GP surgeries in rural areas, (2) how far people travel to attend their GP surgeries in rural areas, and (3) how does this compare to distance travelled by patients to their GPs in more urban areas?