Sheffield Community Panel

Last month, in partnership with Manor & Castle Development Trust, we held our first Community Panel with Sheffield residents. Our Community Panels are made up of local people with lived experience of the policy areas we study in SIPHER, who meet to scrutinise and feedback on the research as it progresses.
The panel was made up of eight local community members and additional facilitators from SIPHER and Manor & Castle Development Trust. Over two 90 minute sessions, the panel learned about the aim and objectives of SIPHER and the role of the Community Panel in providing feedback on research in development and emerging findings. We also discussed a set of draft inclusive economy outcome indicators to gather feedback on SIPHER’s developing inclusive indicator measures, the strengths of the proposed indicators and any important features that might be missing from the indicator set.
The panel will meet again in the late spring to discuss the Sheffield Inclusive Economy Systems map.
Our Greater Manchester panel, developed in partnership with Unlimited Potential, will meet for the first time in early March. Our Scottish panel, delivered with Fife Voluntary Action, plans to meet for a second time, later this month.
Successful Health Foundation awards
SIPHER team members are involved in two projects which received funding from The Health Foundation’s COVID-19 research programme.
Professor Clare Bambra from Newcastle University is leading a project examining geographical and social inequalities in COVID-19 in England, and which individual and place-based factors explain these inequalities. The study will use information on virus cases and deaths in each area to analyse the impact of factors such as living and working conditions, housing and employment.
Professor Petra Meier from the University of Glasgow, Professor Alison Heppenstall and Dr Nik Lomax from the University of Leeds, and Professor Clare Bambra from Newcastle University, are Co-Investigators on a project led by the University of Glasgow’s Professor Vittal Katikireddi. This project will assess the potential impact of economic and welfare policy responses to COVID-19 on mental health and mental health inequalities, including who is impacted the most and what the likely consequences will be. A new mathematical model will be developed to simulate the potential impact of economic changes on the mental health of people in Britain.
New SIPHER podcast series

We are delighted to launch our new podcast series, Systems Science in Public Health. Over the coming months, our host Petra Meier will be catching up with scientists, thinkers, policymakers and practitioners who work in this space.
Our first episode features Professor Jo-An Occhipinti who is Head of the Systems Modelling, Simulation and Data Science at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, Australia. She is also the Managing Director of C-SART which is an international alliance of centres of excellence in systems modelling to inform health and social policy.
The podcast series is a joint venture between the SIPHER Consortium and the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow.
Welcome to the SIPHER team
Welcome to our newest SIPHER colleagues:
- Rachel Anderson is the SIPHER Embedded Researcher at the Scottish Government and a Principal Social Researcher in the Population Health Analysis Unit in the Scottish Government’s Health and Social Care Analysis Division.
- Enni Pulkkinen, Gillian Bell and Aoife Madden are from the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow and are supporting SIPHER’s external communications.
View the entire SIPHER team here.
Recent Publications
Our latest publications include:
- Aburto JM, Kashyap R, Scholey J, Angus C, Ermisch J, Mills MC, Beam Dowd J. (2021) Estimating the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality, life expectancy and lifespan inequality in England and Wales: a population-level analysis. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, doi: 10.1136/jech-2020-215505.
- Brook A, Hearty W, McCartney G, Naik Y, Meier P, Thompson H, Donaghy G. (2021) Systematic review of studies examining the causal relationship between national aggregate economic activity and population health outcomes, including health inequalities. PROSPERO 2021 CRD42021227686.
- Hassannezhad M, Gogarty M, Hill O’Connor C, Cox J, Meier PS, Purshouse R. (2021) A Cybernetic Participatory Approach for Whole-Systems Modelling and Analysis, with Application to Inclusive Economies. Research Report (pre-peer review print).
- McGill E, Er V, Penney T, Egan M, White M, Meier P, Whitehead M, Lock K, Anderson de Cuevas R, Smith R, Savona N, Rutter H, Marks D, de Vocht F, Cummins S, Popay J, Petticrew M. (2021) Evaluation of public health interventions from a complex systems perspective: a research methods review. Social Science & Medicine, 113697, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113697
All SIPHER publications are available on our website.