A Healthy Collaboration

By Professor Paul Boyle, Founding Director, Social Dimensions of Health Institute

Since the establishment of the University of Dundee in 1967, an impressive array of collaborative research has blossomed between the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews.

With the aim of building upon these successes, funding from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) was awarded in 2000 to 'promote partnership' between the two institutions and a variety of research projects were initiated. Health research was identified as one potential area of collaboration and the result was an ambitious proposal to establish the Social Dimensions of Health Institute (SDHI) - a joint institute of the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews. We report here on the progress of this collaboration, drawing attention to some of the exciting new projects which the institute has since embarked upon.

The SDHI is based in Airlie Place, Dundee, and began life in 2004 with a small group of four part time academics, two from each University, supported by a research manager. We have since grown substantially, with the addition of six research staff and a new secretary funded from a range of different sources. We have also recently appointed our first full time academics - Vikki Entwistle as a reader and Rosemary Rushmer as a lecturer. Three further staff from Nursing (Dundee) and Social Anthropology (St Andrews) are also based in the institute, providing a vibrant inter-disciplinary research environment which is generating an impressive amount of activity.

The aim of the SDHI is to encourage and facilitate inter-disciplinary health research between researchers in the two universities. While the overall remit of the SDHI remains a broad one, over the past two years the research niches of the Institute have begun to crystallise.

The theme of self-care and the management of long-term, chronic, conditions considers patients' involvement in their own care from a range of perspectives and explores issues such as rights and responsibilities along the course of patients' journeys through health care. It examines the impact of both individually targeted interventions and organisational changes (such as the introduction of managed clinical networks) on people's contributions to their own care. A significant proportion of this research is carried out in association with the Alliance for Self Care Research.

Our second theme is record linkage and analysis. There is considerable expertise in Tayside in linking patient data for research purposes and the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) based at Ninewells Hospital is a key player in this field. Members of the SDHI work closely with staff in HIC to add value to these medical data, often through linkage to census and other data collected from different sources. Indeed, SDHI and HIC are collaborating to organise a conference on medical data linkage in 2007. The SDHI is also strongly involved in the establishment of the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), which includes linked administrative data from the decennial censuses, vital events (births, deaths, marriages) and hospital admissions, and is one of the largest studies of its type in the world. It will provide an unparalleled resource for examining the links between social characteristics and health in Scotland and how they change over time for a large sample of around 275,000 people.

The third theme focuses on socio-economic variations and health inequalities. This theme brings together a wide range of research which is interested in population health and the factors that underpin social differences in health outcomes. While some of this research is interested in individual differences in health (such as parent and step-parent health) other research focuses on variations in health and well-being across differing social groups and geographical areas. However, the SDHI hopes to go beyond identifying inequalities and, in collaboration with other health and social care agencies, to move towards developing and testing possible strategies to close these gaps.

The SDHI organises a variety of activities which are designed to bring researchers together who may not normally have the opportunity to meet, or may not even realise that others are working on similar problems elsewhere in one of the Universities. We manage a range of events, including an annual conference, seminars, learning and discussion days and postgraduate training weekends. These events are well-attended and are designed to bring together researchers from many academic departments.

The SDHI is also determined to work closely with those in the health service, particularly through collaboration with the local Fife and Tayside Health Boards. Therefore, the SDHI is playing a central role in the evaluation of a range of new strategies funded by the Scottish Executive and designed to address unmet health needs in some of Tayside's most deprived areas.

These collaborations are proving mutually beneficial with the NHS benefiting from the research expertise of a range of academics, and researchers being given the rare opportunity to examine the effectiveness of population based health care strategies in real-life settings. The SDHI is also collaborating closely with Fife Health Board and the Scottish Executive to organise a series of seminars on health inequalities, designed to help us rethink the ways that they can be measured and addressed.

The SDHI's success stems from a fruitful collaboration between the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews who have supported this initiative strongly, but its research success relies upon the health researchers in the two institutions being excited by, and willing to collaborate on, genuinely inter-disciplinary projects. If you have interests in health research and feel that you like to share your ideas with a growing group of experts, please don't hesitate to contact us.

For further information visit www.sdhi.ac.uk or contact Karen Munro at k.m.munro@dundee.ac.uk. A more detailed article on SDHI and their research will appear in the next edition of eContact.