Places and Children’s Health: A Research and Policy Agenda
Published: 29 September 2023
By understanding the ways in which people and places interact to impact health, we can design, plan, build and manage places that protect and improve children’s health and reduce inequality.
By Avril Johnstone, Paul McCrorie, Jon Olsen and Rich Mitchell
Childhood is a critical time in the life course marked by rapid physical, social and cognitive development. Children’s development is influenced by the environments they are growing in; the things they see and hear, the air they breathe, the places they play, where they feel scared and where they feel safe – all these have an impact on health.
Some children grow up in environments that can promote and protect their health, but others grow up in places that may harm their health. Place plays a big role in both creating and perpetuating health inequalities. We know these impacts can last a lifetime and so when we think about improving population health, we need to focus on understanding how place impacts health in childhood. This is one aim of the Places and Health research programme. By understanding the ways in which people and places interact to impact health, we can design, plan, build and manage places that protect and improve children’s health and reduce inequality.
Collaborative workshop
On Wednesday 3rd May 2023, over 70 delegates from research, policy, planning, and practice participated in a workshop focused on how place impacts children’s health. The workshop included presentations on key policy and research findings in this area, followed by breakout sessions where stakeholders identified, synthesised, and prioritised pressing public health issues related to place and children’s health. The workshop findings were then used to inform a research and policy agenda, a report that summarises the most pressing research needs identified by stakeholders during the collaborative breakout sessions.
Read the report here - Places and Children's Health: A Research and Policy Agenda
Key recommendations
Five key recommendations from the workshop's collective insight:
- Understand the multiple levels of influence on children’s health including individual, social, environmental, and policy factors.
- Improve our understanding of how place influences children’s health over time as they mature into adolescence and adulthood.
- Improve our understanding of mechanisms by which characteristics of places either widen or narrow inequalities in children’s health.
- Engage children and young people throughout the design, conduct and reporting of research to enhance research quality and impact.
- Integrate an inequalities lens into our research and ensure seldom heard groups are represented to understand more about what works, for whom, and in which circumstances.
Through collaboration with multisectoral stakeholders, we hope this agenda acts as a catalyst for new and innovative joint projects. We hope that collectively we can contribute to the creation of healthier environments where children live, play and grow up.
Please get in contact if you would like to hear more about the workshop or discuss potential collaborations: avril.johnstone@glasgow.ac.uk
This work, funded by the University of Glasgow’s Knowledge Exchange Fund, was a collaboration between The Places and Health Programme at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit (funding codes: MC_UU_00022/4; SPHSU19) and Actify CIC.
First published: 29 September 2023