In her series of regular blogs around the Engage Awards, Laura Steele is looking at the nominees in each of the six categories. This time, she’s turning the spotlight on the Health & Wellbeing category.
Health and Wellbeing was a highly competitive category with each project having a significant positive impact on day-to-day health and wellbeing issues. Our three nominees come from the University of Manchester, the University of Bristol and the University of Huddersfield.
Our Health, Our Future
In Manchester, researchers from the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, working in partnership with The University of Manchester and the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC) launched an ambitious project to improve the health outcomes of young people.
The Our Health, Our Future initiative, led by Bella Starling, sought to create dialogue between groups of young people, researchers and healthcare professionals to generate new ideas about how research can improve health in communities and formed part of a series of work around health impact, culminating in a major conference titled ‘Our Impact on Health’.
SPHERE
Meanwhile the SPHERE project, launched by Rachael Gooberman-Hill and colleagues at Bristol University’s School of Clinical Sciences, used research to ask how far technology can be used to addressing long-term health conditions that contribute to increasingly unsustainable health care costs.
The project employed 100 researchers to develop sensor systems to provide accurate information about health-related behaviours such as obesity, depression, diabetes, stroke, falls, respiratory conditions, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal disease. The project showed how technology can be used to characterise sedentary behaviour, measure changes in movement, posture and patterns of movement over months, analyse eating behaviours and identify whether people are taking prescribed medication.
None in Three
Our winner in this category was None in Three, a domestic violence project lead by Professor Adele Jones at the University of Huddersfield, which sought to address the fact one in three women living in the Caribbean will face physical or sexual violence – often both – at some point in their lifetime.
Working in partnership with the Sweet Water Foundation, the project has been implemented as a pilot in both Grenada and Barbados and uses collaborative research to explore the causes of domestic violence and the action needed to end it and to deliver training for stakeholders and civil society organisations.
Our Engage Awards ceremony took place on 29th November 2016 in Bristol as part of the Engage Conference. Find out more about all our finalists and award winners.
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