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Cross-Cutting Theme 7: Public Health

Public health

Public health is one of the two new cross-cutting themes for ARC WM (which began in early 2020), and we are actively looking for collaboration with other themes and other researchers. An overview of our theme is available here.

Public health is often defined as the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health and wellbeing through the organised efforts of society. It encapsulates three distinct domains:

  • Health improvement, which means promoting healthy lifestyles, healthy contexts and healthy environments, as well as tackling inequalities.
  • Health protection, which means prevention, preparedness for, screening and response to infectious diseases and other threats to health.
  • Health service improvement, which involves providing public health expertise to inform the effective and efficient planning and delivery of healthcare.

Public health feeds into every aspect of health and health care; our unique selling point is that we take a population view.

Theme leads

Associate Professor Oyinlola Oyebode,
O.R.O.Oyebode@warwick.ac.uk
University of Warwick

Professor Kate Jolly,
c.b.jolly@bham.ac.uk
University of Birmingham

Objectives

Our aim as a cross-cutting theme is to weave our work in with all the other ARC WM themes.

We are actively looking for collaboration with other themes and other researchers, and are particularly looking forward to working on the nationwide ARC cross-cutting themes on Inequalities, Population Health, Behavioural Science and Prevention.

Latest updates

We currently have 24 projects registered on our database of Public Health projects across our themes, including:

Workplace health and wellbeing: a mixed-methods evaluation of cross-regional workplace health initiatives including a cluster randomised controlled trial of a behaviour change intervention

Leads: Dr Laura Kudrna (Theme 6) with Kelly Ann Schmidtke, Lena Al-Khudairy, Laura Quinn, Richard Lilford, Paul Bird, Kate Jolly, Ila Bharatan, Graeme Currie, Magdalena Skrybant, Niyah Campbell, and colleagues from ARC Northwest London and ARC North East and North Cumbria

Dates: September 2021 – September 2023