Tackling Neighbourhood Inequalities - Insights From the MCA Programme
New insights into addressing health inequalities
Contributing new insights into tackling health inequalities, synthesis of findings from Mobilising Community Assets Phases 1 and 2, has been published in Frontiers in Public Health. The synthesis encompassed 27 diverse projects with over 12,000 participants making an innovative contribution to the body of research concerned with health inequalities. Outcomes showed that:
- Core components for ensuring effective cross-sector collaborations comprise relationship-building, multidisciplinary working, training and capacity building;
- Cross-sector collaboration between community organisations and healthcare systems could create long-lasting effects for people with long-term conditions, including those facing structural disadvantage;
- Interventions targeting raising awareness of deprivation, social determinants, health behaviours, volunteering and community empowerment are valuable, but their impact varies by context;
- Projects applying an intersectional lens, especially those centred on listening to the voices of people with lived experience, offered deeper insights as to why varied approaches are necessary across different contexts;
- Community engagement might only improve health among disadvantaged populations if it is robustly designed and implemented using effective consultation and participation;
- Additional enablers are approaches that utilise integrated-care, innovative creative-health solutions and strategies for sustaining, replicating, and scaling up longer term projects; and
- The use of creative and participatory research methods further strengthens evidence collection.
Overall, findings highlight the importance of building trust, understanding cultural relevance, and enabling community empowerment to engage underserved groups effectively. The research provides a more complete knowledge of community engagement and cross-sector collaborations than might have been derived from any single study.
Link to open access article: Thomson, L.J., Mughal, R., & Chatterjee, H.J. (2026). Tackling neighbourhood health inequalities in the UK through cross-sector collaborations and community engagement: Thematic synthesis of focus group and questionnaire data. Frontiers in Public Health. 14:1832109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1832109
Authors: Linda Thomson, Rabya Mughal
