SIPHER’s synthetic population: animated explainer video
Please take five minutes to view our animation which describes how we have created our synthetic population in SIPHER, and how we will use to it to understand how proposed policy changes might affect people in different ways. Do share the video with anyone who might find it useful.
View the animation here – https://vimeo.com/528885282
Systems mapping in Clackmannanshire
A second round of systems mapping workshops took place last month as part of the Clackmannanshire Wellbeing Economy project. Around 50 policy actors and stakeholders attended over two afternoons and we have been able to add a lot of detail to the map to inform our research in SIPHER and policy priority setting in Clackmannanshire.
Community Panels
All three of SIPHER’s Community Panels have now had their second round of meetings. Our Community Panels are made up of local people in Fife, Manchester and Sheffield who have lived experience relevant to SIPHER’s key policy areas: inclusive economies, adverse childhood experiences, housing, and mental health.
This round of workshops focused on scrutiny of the latest systems maps in each location, and each Panel also had a question & answer session with one of SIPHER’s co-directors (Robin and Petra) as we start to build relationships between the Panels and the researchers. Moving forward, there is appetite from Panel members to meet more frequently. We’re delighted that our Panels are so keen and are working with our partner community organisations to try to make this happen.
Grant success
We are delighted to be partnering with University of Plymouth researchers on ‘Intervention development for community-based self-referred social prescribing’, a project funded through the MRC’s Public Health Intervention Development Scheme. It brings together a broad range of stakeholders with experience of designing, delivering and accessing social prescribing, to collect information about self-referrals in the community. SIPHER is leading the systems mapping activity with the aim of understanding how the systems work, how these structures interact, and how to best support them to offer activities in the best way for individuals to attend and improve their health.
Inclusive Economies Advisory Group
Our Inclusive Economies Advisory Group met for the second time at the end of April. Discussion topics included:
- progress to date on the inclusive economies systems maps and opportunities for further investigation
- SIPHER’s proposed inclusive economy indicator set which will measure whether an economic system in a place is more or less inclusive compared to other places, and whether it is becoming more or less inclusive over time
- a collaboration between workstrands to integrate SIPHER-7 wellbeing into the synthetic population.
New on the SIPHER blog
Alistair Brown has written a blog about how we label inequality, for example, does adding “health” as a prefix to “inequalities” direct our minds away from systematic solutions that we know work (like economic redistribution), towards individual solutions that we know don’t work to the same degree (like healthy lifestyle advice)?
Dr Mohammad Hassannezhad and Daniel Chedgzoy have written a blog about cascading effects in policy systems and their recent experience with participatory mapping of the Inclusive Economy system in Sheffield City Region.
SIPHER podcast series
Two further episodes of the SIPHER podcast are now available.
In the first, SIPHER co-Director Prof. Petra Meier is in conversation with Brian Castellani, Professor of Sociology at Durham University and co-Investigator of the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN). Petra has also recorded a podcast with SIPHER co-Director, Professor Robin Purshouse. Robin is Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Sheffield and his research interests include modelling, analysis and optimisation for supporting decision-making.
You can listen to the podcasts here
Welcome to new team members
- Fraser Bell has joined SIPHER as the new Embedded Researcher at Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). Fraser is a Lead Analyst in the Population Health Research Team at GMCA.
- Jenny Llewellyn is a Research and Knowledge Transfer Practitioner for SIPHER, based at the University of Sheffield and working with Sheffield City Council and the NIHR CRN.
View the entire SIPHER team here.