We often hear ‘the system’ is broken, but what do we mean by this? How can changing the way we think about, define, research, evidence, monitor, evaluate and resource ‘the system’ lead to meaningful change for deprived communities? How will this change benefit those who have first-hand experience of trauma, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, displacement, poor mental health or imprisonment?

REALITIES takes a human-systems approach noting ‘health and social care systems’ (HSCS) are constructed mental representations of relationships existing in the world to promote health for people.

Our Scottish consortium of 57 people has five established asset hubs in Clackmannanshire, Dundee, Easter Ross, Edinburgh and North Lanarkshire with strong relationships uniting conflicting ways of seeing the world. Through phase 2, we co-produced a systems-level model with deprived communities, policymakers, practitioners and researchers collecting and respecting different types of knowledge and alternative evidence-bases (from arts performances to nature walks; words to statistics) as equally important to understand complexities of unjust and avoidable health differences.

This is a series of Research-Practice-Policy Partnership (RPPP) briefings evidencing key insights from the REALITIES consortium hub funded by UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s) mobilising community assets to tackle health inequalities programme. Our research takes a transdisciplinary approach to investigate how local, cultural, and natural assets and activities support improvements in health inequalities.

Our briefings were created by and with frontline practitioners in collaboration with community members, community-embedded and university researchers, representatives from the third sector and local authorities alongside artists, environmentalists and other partners.

These resources aim to help policymakers, practitioners, researchers and commissioners understand how collaboration and partnership working can combat health inequalities by paying careful attention to both barriers and enablers. We’re especially interested in relationships and creations between human, non-human and more-than-human connections and entanglements.

Fieldwork was conducted from February to November 2023 across three Scottish hubs in Clackmannanshire, Easter Ross in the Highlands and North Lanarkshire. It also connected with displaced communities such as prisoners, ex-offenders, refugees, asylum seekers and those experiencing homelessness.

Connecting with our communities across our geographical hubs.

We co-analyse our data using the REALITIES model with community-embedded and academic researchers, practitioners and project partners through close collaboration with community members. Our model connects People, Places, Processes, Price, Power and Purpose. It researches, analyses, and tests these 6 Ps simultaneously using different creative, participatory approaches and innovative datasets alongside traditional ones. Through this, we get a nuanced understanding of: