Resources aimed at supporting professionals in urban development to include health in their practice are now available from the TRUUD research programme.
Based at the University of Bristol, and with researchers across six different universities, TRUUD (Tackling the Root causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development) is a £10 million research project, looking at how urban places can be planned to reduce non-communicable diseases such as cancers, diabetes, obesity, mental ill-health and respiratory illness.
In depth interviews or workshops with 224 professionals working across the urban development sector revealed that while they agreed that health is important they lacked power, guidance and direction on what to do to incorporate health in thinking and actions. Six workshops, led by industry leaders from Oxford Properties and Dandara Living presented evidence and examples of healthier practice with lived experiences of unhealthy environments as part of research on how to change industry mindsets.
Now widely available for all of industry to use, online resources include:
- Signposting to networks to support prioritising and integrating health;
- Evidence connecting urban environments and health;
- Examples of how organisations are incorporating health in practice;
- Films exploring personal experiences of living in unhealthy places;
- A new cost/benefit analysis model, HAUS; and
- Guidance and tools
The intervention team is led by Dr Krista Bondy at the University of Stirling. She said:
“Now we’ve finished testing how professionals respond to our intervention on changing mindsets towards health, we can share them with the wider development and property community. We would like to thank all the participants for taking part in our research workshops. They did so, hoping it will promote change in the way their industry plans and develops urban places.”
Zoe Sharpe, Senior Development Manager at Dandara Living, said:
“It was a real pleasure to collaborate with the TRUUD team on the development of the ‘Changing Mindsets’ intervention and to co-create the workshop material that I had the opportunity to present to industry peers and policy makers.
“From a presenter’s perspective, it was encouraging to see such strong engagement from participants, many of whom were eager to explore how they can better understand and prioritise health in the development of urban places. The new online resources now available through TRUUD are an excellent starting point – or continuation – for anyone on that same knowledge journey, one that we at Dandara Living have also been on.”
Visit Resources to Integrate Health.
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Notes for Editors
- Tackling Root causes upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development (TRUUD) is a research project, based at the University of Bristol, looking at how urban centres can be planned to reduce health inequalities. The TRUUD consortium includes the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Reading, Manchester, Stirling and the University of the West of England across disciplines of public health, law, psychology, management, systems engineering, environmental and health economics, real estate, planning, urban development, policy and public involvement.
- TRUUD has created an economic valuation model – Health Appraisal of Urban Systems, (‘HAUS’) – that allows developers or planners to consider and adjust a range of health factors. HAUS provides unit costs for more than 70 health outcomes, separated so that they can be attributed across multiple agencies from a societal perspective.
- TRUUD is supported by the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP), an initiative funded by UK Research and Innovation Councils, the Department of Health and Social Care and the UK devolved administrations, and leading health research charities.
