Each one teach one: insights on community-based research from 16 community-university partnerships
Mughal, R., Reynolds, R., Thomson, L.J., Waterson, H., Manley, K., Gilmore, C., Coulter, A. & Chatterjee, H.J. (2024) Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities: A synthesis and review of Phase 2 case studies. London: University College London.
The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) body funded 16 projects under Phase 2 of the programme “Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities”, which ran throughout 2023. Their goal was to build cross-sectoral consortia to address health inequalities as experienced in a diverse range of communities and localities across the UK, including some of the most economically deprived areas.
This synthesis brings together insights generated by those 16 community-university partnerships. They found that, since health issues manifest in integrated communities of people, so too do the assets that can effectively address many of the health challenges that people in local communities do face. Therefore, they worked towards identifying and strengthening existing assets in communities that can address health needs and inequalities through a broad range of successfully co-designed and co-produced activities. Consortia have generated new knowledge on how to build scalable health programmes with communities that, taken collectively, generate health knowledge across broad age ranges, genders, classes and ethnicities.
The economic investment in these projects has resulted in the active creation of positive conditions for greater public involvement in community research for health, thus highlighting the crucial importance of funding to help and sustain the integration of community health assets into health systems.
See full study: https://ncch.org.uk/uploads/MCA_Phase-2_Case_Study_Synthesis.pdf
Resource Output from the Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities (MCA) Programme
Mobilising Community Assets (MCA) is a three-phase UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funded Research Programme running from 2021 to 2027. It is coordinated by the Culture-Nature-Health Research Group at University College London, in partnership with the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) and funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), led by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Medical Research Council (MRC). MCA has encouraged the projects it has funded throughout the UK to share knowledge and approaches to integration of community assets into the integrated care structures that exist in the local communities.
