Accelerating health and social equity through inclusive research practices

Professor Hatch will focus on the importance of integrating collaborative and inclusive approaches to knowledge production, dissemination, action across current projects within the Health Inequalities Research Group. The team uses innovative quantitative and qualitative methods, including linked survey and health record data as well as virtual reality (VR) methods to improve understanding of lived experience and to influence policies that have potential for sustainable change. She will share examples from the CONNECT study within the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, working to advance research with communities that have often been ignored, to examine and disrupt structures maintaining inequities in mental health access, experience and outcomes; the Wellcome and ESRC-funded TIDES study utilising a participatory framework to identify processes through which racial and ethnic inequalities in mental health and occupational outcomes are produced, maintained and resisted and the recently funded Wellcome Discovery Award for CARE-HSC, aiming to address and dismantle structural factors that perpetuate racial discrimination and harassment within care systems. Across the work, the team uses co-production and reflexive approaches to generate and challenge new and existing theoretical paradigms, creative methods, and reproducible tools for mobilising and empowering stakeholders. Among their goals are advancements in knowledge, a more inclusive evidence-base and new expectations for a contract of care that disrupts the impacts of systems of oppression and elevates caring roles. Finally, she will outline how the current co-development of the Health and Social Equity Collective brings together social and health inequalities expertise across sectors in the UK and globally to accelerate the pace of change in tackling inequalities and inequities. Health and Social Equity Collective brings together social and health inequalities expertise across sectors in the UK and globally to accelerate the pace of change in tackling inequalities and inequities.

About the speaker

Professor Stephani Hatch is the Vice Dean for Culture, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion and Professor of Sociology and Epidemiology leading the Health Inequalities Research Group at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London. Professor Hatch works across sectors to deliver interdisciplinary health inequalities research and action with an emphasis on race at the intersection of other social identities, integrating collaborative approaches to knowledge production, dissemination, action and outreach in training and research through the Health Inequalities Research Network (HERON), since 2010. She leads the Wellcome funded Collective Action for Race Equity in Health and Social Care (CARE-HSC) and the Wellcome and ESRC funded Tackling Inequalities and Discrimination Experiences in Health Services (TIDES) study and co-leads the Health and Social Equity Collective, the Marginalised Communities programme within the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health and the Narrowing Inequalities Platform within the UKRI Population Health Improvement (PHI-UK), Population Mental Health Consortium. Professor Hatch holds national and international advisory roles including: member of the MQ Mental Health Sciences Council; the NHS Race and Health Observatory Board (and Chair of the RHO Academic Reference Group); the NHS England and Improvement Advancing Mental Health Equalities Taskforce (Chair, Mental Health Equalities Data Quality and Research Subgroup); and advisor for the NHSE Anti-Racism Project Engagement and Oversight group with the Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for England, Nursing and Midwifery Council and NHS Confederation.

This event is hosted by Durham University's Institute for Medical Humanities, led by Angela Woods.

This event is free to attend.

Zoom details will be circulated closer to the event.