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.