Oxfordshire Health Humanities Project

Oxfordshire might appear to be a relatively healthy and prosperous county, but these perceptions hide profound health inequalities. The county has

Leys Pool and Leisure Centre, Oxford. Photo credit: Yuxin Peng

17 out of 407 Lower Super Output Areas ranked within the 20% most deprived areas nationally; one of these is in the 10% most deprived. People in the county’s poorest neighbourhoods are dying, on average, ten years younger than people in the most affluent ones.

Across various levels of stakeholders working in public health, including the County and City Councils, integrated care boards, local charities and volunteer groups, efforts are ongoing to minimise these health inequalities. In partnership with Oxfordshire County Council, this project evaluates two community health programmes that have been launched recently and focus on the most deprived wards in Oxfordshire:

• Community Health Development Officer (CHDO) programme: Funded by the Oxfordshire County Council, CHDOs take a community-based approach to encourage health and wellbeing, communicate health messages and facilitate health-enabling activities to build social capacity and resilience in the communities most at risk of experiencing inequalities in Oxfordshire.
• Well Together: Funded by the Integrated Care Board, the Well Together programme will provide substantial prevention funding directly to existing and new social infrastructure organisations and groups at a neighbourhood level, in the areas most likely to experience inequality.

This interdisciplinary project provides a unique opportunity to apply humanities methodologies – including long-term contextualization, social and cultural analyses, and a review of methodologies to measure health – to current health concerns.  It is also a unique partnership between the University of Oxford and Oxfordshire County Council Public Health, encouraging analysis of where community health and global health are located, as well as where they overlap.

Principal Investigator: Erica Charters, Professor of the Global History of Medicine, Academic Lead of Medical Humanities

Researchers: Urvi Khaitan and Yuxin Peng