Strategic Challenges

Health and Wellbeing

Avoidable health problems caused by social and economic factors are central to understanding huge differences in life expectancy - both between countries, where the gap can be over 40 years, and within the UK itself where the gap can be over 20 years for communities just a few miles apart.

Maintaining and promoting physical and psychological health and wellbeing for all the population is a pre-condition of a more prosperous and cohesive society. Marked inequalities in health remind us how far we are from achieving the goal of health and wellbeing for all. Lower levels of wellbeing and ill health hold back employment and productivity, and make public services more difficult and costly to provide.

Social science has demonstrated that individuals in less advantaged positions are more likely to suffer poor health. Research has also shown that childhood circumstances as well as material and environmental disadvantage over an individual's lifecourse can have long-term implications for health. The relationship between social, economic and environmental drivers of health has been shown to operate not only within national boundaries but also, increasingly, between countries, as integration of the global economy develops.

How ill-health links to poverty is a global concern. Social and economic development in parts of Africa and Asia is held back by preventable disease and disability. Furthermore, the health sector itself can become a generator of poverty. Market-driven health sector reforms in middle and low income countries may shift the burden of payment to patients and pull them into poverty. More than ever, social science is needed in the study of health systems.

The challenges facing social science include:

• The consequences of the global economic downturn for health and wellbeing
• The local, national and global social, economic and environmental causes of improved physical and mental health and wellbeing across the lifecourse, particularly in light of an ageing population
• What underpins resilience in the face of ill health and wellbeing
• The social and economic dimensions of predicting, preventing and responding to threats from existing and new infectious diseases and other health challenges
• The long run socio-economic consequences of ill health and poor wellbeing
• Identifying and developing evidenced, effective policies and interventions that lead to improved health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities.

Work addressing such challenges can also be strengthened by considering the activities of other Research Councils, conceptually in areas relevant to health innovations such as systems biology and in gene-environment interaction (epigenetics), population health sciences and in application areas including obesity, addiction and dementia.

Utilisation of national and international data resources, including the growing wealth of cohort, other longitudinal and administrative data is critical, as is developing new and innovative ways of combining diverse datasets in order to understand health and wellbeing.

This challenge will complement the work of by investigating the socio-economic drivers of individual health behaviours and identifying interventions that address them. Links to ; , and point to the need for new social scientific understandings of the way pandemics may spread and the effectiveness of counter-measures, and for more equitable healthcare systems that do not impoverish the sick. Health policy is taken up in and, particularly in occupational health in . Additionally, interventions on global ill-health will provide synergies with and .

Where medical interventions alone are insufficient we now have the methods, data and concepts for the social science of health and wellbeing, especially when it comes to improving life chances and reducing inequalities. Social and medical science work best in partnership.To this end, the ESRC will strengthen its collaborations with the Medical Research Council (MRC), Department of Health, Office of Strategic Co-ordination of Health Research (OSCHR), charities and patient groups.

Achievements 2005-2008

• Enabling practitioners and policymakers to tackle complex public health issues, through five new co-funded centres of excellence
• Through a new, innovative international research centre securing better understanding of how health and wellbeing are related to personal and professional skills and to employment and social participation.This work relies on our unique, world class longitudinal birth cohort studies
• Co-ordinating social scientists and scientists in genomic science and technology, promoting public dialogue, in which research connects with discussion of policy and bringing social science into decision making

Priorities for 2009-2014

By 2014 the ESRC will have:

• Invested, with partners, in the social science underpinning of interventions to promote improved physical and psychological wellbeing, better social care, healthy ageing, and the reduction of obesity and infectious disease
• Developed with national and international collaboration, a comparative programme on how to reduce physical and psychological health inequalities
• Maintained its investment in the internationally renowned series of birth cohort studies; developed a new birth cohort study beginning in 2012; and promoted access to the data it will produce through a dedicated Birth Cohort Facility
• Promoted access to and use of e-health records through collaboration with the OSCHR and other relevant partners; and through the development of virtual safe settings
• Built research capacity through studentships, fellowships and training opportunities at the interface of biomedical and social sciences.