By Dr. Issy Bray and Yarden Woolf
The Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing aims to impact directly on population health and wellbeing, to reduce health inequalities and enable ethical and reflexive contributions to public health policy and practice. Our approach is multidisciplinary and spans physical, health and social sciences.
Dr. Issy Bray is the Director of the Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing and Associate Professor in Public Health (Epidemiology). She has been with UWE Bristol for over 12 years and currently teaches on the Quantitative Health Research module and the Epidemiology of Non-Communicable Disease modules (MSc Public Health) as well as supervising PhD and MSc students.
The Global Public Health theme brings together innovative social science, health, and implementation research to address pressing population health challenges around the world. Current work includes research funded through the NIHR Global Health Research Programme in collaboration with the Nepal Injury Research Centre at Kathmandu Medical College, with projects exploring interdisciplinary approaches to road danger reduction and the cultural and sociological factors that influence injury risk and prevention in Nepal. The theme also includes research on migration and migrant integration, generating evidence that informs policy and supports progress toward global health equity.
Ageing Well is a brand-new theme for the Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing at UWE Bristol. The vision for this theme is to carry out and support inclusive, interdisciplinary and world-leading public health research that promotes healthy ageing including dementia across the life course underpinned by a socioecological approach to health and wellbeing. Emily has recently completed a qualitative study working closely with voluntary agencies in West Somerset and Cornwall to better understand the particular experiences and challenges of people living with dementia and their families living in rural and coastal communities.
Our research explores how the design of places can shape everyday behaviours, reduce risks, and improve health and wellbeing for communities. This includes looking at strategies for safer streets, stronger community safety, and better integration of health into planning decisions, while also seeking to reduce environmental impacts and improve population health and wellbeing. Emma is currently leading on a project tasked with creating guidance to help local planning authorities in England create healthier places for everyone through better integration of health into local planning policies.
This theme is essentially about creating communities where people can thrive. It brings together community groups, organisations, and networks with public, private, and non-governmental partners to drive social action and meaningful change. Building healthy communities demands a multidisciplinary lens spanning diverse topics such as urban planning, healthy ageing, and digital inclusion, while applying robust methodologies and evaluation design to generate high-quality evidence. Amy is currently working on a project which tackles the complex challenge of drug and alcohol dependency by exploring how individuals engage with community-based resources and what supports or hinders that connection.
Our work within this theme explores different approaches to and methodologies for public involvement and co-production, and what impact these can have. We have a particular focus on how the voice of those experiencing health inequalities can be meaningfully included in research prioritization, design and implementation, and what power-sharing can mean in practice. Jo recently led a project which co-produced resources for Black people living with stroke, following the ‘Experience-Based Co-design’ (EBCD) methodology. The project included the public as co-applicants and core team members, community researchers and co-design facilitators
The Public Health Economics and Evaluation theme focuses on generating robust, policy-relevant economic evidence to inform decision-making across public health, prevention, and integrated care. The theme leads the centre’s work on economic evaluation, return-on-investment modelling, realist economic evaluation, and capacity-building with local authorities and ICS partners, ensuring that our research translates into practical, scalable improvements in population health. A key project Hamad is involved in is the NIHR-funded realist evaluation and economic appraisal of how mosque-based health screening, education and prevention activities influence health and wellbeing in Muslim communities.