The Power of Working Together – Working in partnership really works!
Welcome to the latest CHAD blog. We really value the opportunity that blogging creates for us as a team to draw a breath and reflect on our progress over the last couple of months and hope it is interesting to you too. We want to share with you a couple of things that have made us proud, and that will help to make a difference to health and wellbeing in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent.
CHAD’s vision is to carry out translational research that is locally relevant and internationally excellent. We aim to increase our impact through making ‘health and wellbeing’ everybody’s business, and through actively and meaningfully engaging partners in all aspects of the research process. That includes people from Local Government, uniformed services, NHS, community, academia and private and third sector.
Two areas where this approach is working well are the CHAD seminar series and the small grants fund. We are also testing out this approach with communities with a view to setting up a CHAD Community Action Research Network following on from the Big Community Conversation.
We are delighted that our seminar series continues to be well attended by a range of practitioners, community members and academics; you can access the slides from the presenters here. The seminars get excellent feedback and are really helping to break down barriers between research and practice.
We also successfully delivered the CHAD small grants programme which has resulted in CHAD funding a total of 7 research projects into health inequalities that will directly benefit our communities for a total cost of £20,003. All of the projects take a collaborative approach to research and are grounded in our local communities.
Congratulations go to:
- Sarah Dean who will be carrying out research into the impact of psychosocial factors on the impact of duration of breastfeeding in Stoke on Trent
- Sarah Page who will be working with Stoke-on-Trent Public Health team and student researchers to study normalising breastfeeding through adolescent attitude
- Richard Machin who is working with Disability Solutions to explore the impact of migration from disability living allowance to personal independence payments on claimants who experience problems with mental health
- Janet Hetherington who will be working with Middleport Matters to establish a team of community researchers aged between 14 and 19 in the local area
- Joanne Lloyd will be studying the role of perceived personal deprivation in gambling
- Liz Boath and colleagues will be carrying out research to test the feasibility of using peer support as an intervention for antenatal depression
- Peter Kevern will be working with the South Staffordshire Locality Commissioning Partnership comparing the change in mental wellbeing before, during and post intervention across 11 partnership commissioned programmes
Look out for more detail on the small grants research on our website over the coming weeks, and be sure to book on to any events that are coming up. We will be showcasing CHAD research projects, including the small grants research, at our health inequalities symposium on 9th November 2017, more details to follow but pencil the date in your diary!
