Home is where the health is?

‘One of the recurring themes in the situations we deal with is that things are not as simple as most people imagine them to be,’ says Phil Hanlon, Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow. A key figure in GoWell, a ten-year study into investment in housing-led regeneration in Glasgow, Professor Hanlon is making important discoveries about the links between housing and health. But whereas other University researchers may achieve results by testing variables in a lab, Professor Hanlon is working with a much more complicated set of scenarios – real life.

GoWell is a collaborative partnership between the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, the University of Glasgow and the Medical Research Council Social and Public Heath Sciences Unit. It is sponsored by Glasgow Housing Association, Communities Scotland, NHS Health Scotland and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. Its purpose is to explore the heavy investment - £2 billion over 10 years – that is being channelled into regeneration in Glasgow.

‘We don’t need to wait until the end of ten years to see results. What we want to do is generate learning and to feed into and help inform the actions of those who are doing regeneration work. Probably the most important thing we’ll do is provide real time data and real time insights from a neutral perspective, which can help make this a more effective and a better process.’ Professor Phil Hanlon

The project will look at thousands of individuals over 12 intervention areas, as well as examining these areas as a whole, and also the entire ecology of the city. ‘It is one of the most complex studies I have ever been involved in and that’s because we are trying to cover many levels for a good reason,’ Professor Hanlon explains. ‘It is vital to understand developments at the population level, the policy level and the local level if we are going to make a judgement about the impact of this regeneration.’

What this means in practice is building up a rich understanding of the process using cross-sectional studies, conducting follow up interviews with those who have been re-housed, engaging policy makers and also working with researchers to assess less tangible aspects such as litter, graffiti levels and the notion of empowerment through housing, for example.

‘To actually dissect out the pathway of attribution: to explain, why the health of the population in question improves or worsens; is notoriously difficult in these natural experiments,’ says Professor Hanlon. ‘But I think we will be able to say in a more detailed and complete way than we have ever been able to before, what the impact has been of these interventions.’