Research
Scotland in lockdown
Seven members of IHW Social Scientists in Health were involved in running a CSO-funded rapid response project into the impacts of lockdown on four already socially marginalised groups in Scotland, between July and December 2020.
These groups were people with disabilities and long-term health conditions; refugees, asylum seekers and destitution affected people; victim-survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and; people in and affected by the criminal justice system. Health, both the experience of ill health during the pandemic and healthcare access, affected participants in all groups.
Our key findings were that
- Information serves as a gatekeeper to people’s ability to navigate the risks of COVID-19 as well as a mediator for how people think or feel about these risks.
- Experiences varied but a shared theme was of lives of both continuity of pre-existing hardship, and change in terms of intensifying challenge through growing constraint of already circumscribed lives.
- Services were stopped, slowed, or contracted, despite need expanding and intensifying.
Staff involved
Christopher Bunn
Nicola Burns
Alicia Davis
Lucy Pickering
Nicholas Watson
Phillippa Wiseman