Overview
The ADR Wales Health and Well-being programme brings together health and administrative data with novel geospatial data to provide insights into health and well-being in Wales.
Led by Professor Ronan Lyons OBE and Associate Professors Richard Fry and Lucy Griffiths, this programme of work will provide insights into the role socio-environmental factors play in the inequalities that exist across Wales and how these impact on the health and well-being of the Welsh population.
The research programme aims to provide a robust policy evaluation of The Well-being of Future Generations Act and The Active Travel Wales Act. In support of the Programme for Government, the research team will generate new evidence for these policy areas through collaboration with key stakeholders Public Health Wales, Natural Resources Wales and HDR UK.
To date the research agenda has focused on providing analysis to guide the pandemic response in Wales and the UK. Through active membership of government advisory groups, the team has provided insights from linked data analyses into diverse policy areas, including social care, education, changes in service utilisation, risk to health care workers and wider geospatial modelling of Covid-19 infections at UK and Welsh levels. Alongside the Covid-19 recovery agenda the research team will evaluate the impacts of active living environments in promoting Active Travel and support other initiatives, including AD|ARC.
Looking ahead, research will focus on three core areas:
- characterisation of ‘Long Covid-19’ in the Welsh population and understanding the socio-environmental inequalities which drive it
- development of models of 24-hour exposures at home, to and from work, and in work, for a range of environmental factors in collaboration with ADR Scotland
- evaluation of the impacts of the built and natural environment on the health and well-being of the Welsh population.
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.