Surviving The Pandemic: Seeking to uncover Lambeth and Southwark existing health inequalities and how Covid-19 impacted them.
Between March 2020 and July 2021, the UK spent almost 500 days under some sort of COVID 19 restriction. These restrictions ranged from a full lockdown to the ‘rule of six’. How many people can say that there was a global pandemic and lockdown in their lifetime before COVID 19 happened? I’m sure barely anyone would be able to respond! I’m sure we can all agree that 2020 was a bizarre year and a global pandemic is something we would NEVER want to live through again. Covid didn’t only create many casualties but it also extenuated all the inequalities that existed beforehand.
So how do we know what inequalities existed beforehand and how Covid has impacted that? Although covid extenuated a lot of inequalities, there are many reasons for these inequalities and this project intends to explore them!
ClearView Research has been commissioned by Impact on Urban Health to create a research survey and qualitative project in partnership with Opinium to understand what are the most important health inequalities that exist for underrepresented communities and how the pandemic has impacted these. This study has a particular focus around the London Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. This mix methods study, using both quantitative and qualitative research, aims to fill the gaps in knowledge regarding these inequalities so more can be done to help the communities affected.
Now for us, it is most important to include the groups that are most affected by these inequalities in our scoping phase. We recruited 7 members of the community and trained them to become community researchers. Over 3 weeks they learnt about quantitative and qualitative methods, ethics and more. This empowered all community members to engage in conversations which were used to create the research design.
The community researchers thoroughly enjoyed the training sessions and provided us with positive feedback.
“Really helpful, information has been great, good dynamics, 5 thumbs up”
“Completely come in as a stranger to research, been explained and broken down well, educational and entertaining. Good group dynamic”
The project is still ongoing and we are entering into our final phases of completing the research design with the help of the community researchers. The process has taught me the importance of in-person sessions as it allows us to communicate better and engage with one another further.
Watch this space to see the responses from the survey and the insights on existing health inequalities that will be discovered.