North & West Bristol Locality Partner

    Healthy Ageing in North and West Bristol

    North and West Bristol Locality Partnership is collaborating with The University of the West of England and Neighbourly Lab to undertake community-based healthy ageing research.

    About the project

    This project aims to understand and address health inequalities facing residents in North and West Bristol who are at risk of a steep decline in their health. Together, we are working to come up with community solutions.  We want people to feel supported locally to both manage and prevent further decline in their health and wellbeing.

    Neighbourly Lab and the University of the West England (UWE) were commissioned by the North and West Bristol Locality Partnership to undertake this research which took place between September 2023 and February 2024.

    What we did

    Community focused research was carried out as follows:

    1. Desk Research to understand the current provision of community activities and opportunities in outer North and West Bristol.
    2. Interviews with 20 residents of the target cohort to learn about their experiences, attitudes and behaviours around health and wellbeing. This included understanding how their community supports their health and wellbeing.
    3. Co-design workshops to bring together our research team, residents, voluntary and community organisations, healthcare staff and the North and West Bristol Locality Partnership. This enabled participants to come up with ideas that could help address some of the challenges uncovered in the research around access to healthy ageing support in the community.
    4. Community engagement led by four Community Researchers based in the North and West Bristol area. The Community Researchers asked for feedback from the local community on a short list of ten ideas.
    5. All the ideas from the research were discussed and those most likely to succeed locally were put forward to the Locality Partnership to take forward.

     

    What we found

    • There are already a wide variety of community activities run by the voluntary and community sector in outer North and West Bristol. However, residents who could benefit from these activities are not always accessing them.
    • People are not easily able to find information on local community activities. This ‘information gap’ could be filled through more joined-up approaches and sharing information in everyday places and spaces for residents to access.
    • The idea of warm welcome sessions for new or unengaged members of the community would be beneficial in addressing health inequalities in the local community.
    • Opportunities for coming together around food and skills sharing were welcomed.

    About the approach

    A community-based approach to this research has proved successful in understanding barriers and opportunities for local residents. Ongoing engagement with the community is vital for the next stage of the project.

    Next steps

    The outcomes from all the research have been shared back to the Locality Partnership and we are now creating an approach to deliver a solution with local community and voluntary sector organisations. We are also sourcing funding for this work.

    We want to thank all those residents and organisations who have contributed to the research to date.

    For any queries, please get in touch with the Locality Partnership at bnssg.nandwbristollp@nhs.net.