Making the population healthier with social science

The social sciences play an important role in informing and helping to change the environments, policies, practices and behaviours that influence the health and wellbeing of people.

Professor Linda Bauld FAcSS is Bruce and John Usher Professor of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. She conducts behavioural research within public health, with a particular focus on how to prevent chronic non-contagious diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease through changing environmental factors and behaviour.

Professor Rosie McEachan is Director of the Born in Bradford Research Programme, a longitudinal health study following the lives of over 60,000 people, adults and children, in Bradford, to better understand why some families stay healthy and others fall ill.

Watch the video below to hear from both Linda and Rosie on how their research is helping to make the population healthier in the UK.

Video transcript

Professor Linda Bauld FAcSS:

Social science can improve health and it does that through working with other disciplines, including biomedical sciences to better understand complex health problems and support government and others to address them.

I’m Linda Bauld, I’m a Professor of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh.

Almost 90% of deaths in the UK are caused by non-communicable diseases. Those are chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory conditions, and actually some of them are preventable by changing environmental and behavioural risk factors.

Much of my work has focused on nicotine and tobacco. And, so, what we do is look at behavioural interventions and also policy. So, how can we support smokers to think about making a quit attempt, or to quit, and what are the most effective interventions to help them.

And then what should the government do to change the environment around tobacco and nicotine use to make tobacco less appealing, affordable, attractive etc.

So, our studies contributed to the introduction of standardised packaging, which is removing the last form of tobacco marketing. And most recently, our randomised control trials have led to the introduction of a nationwide programme in England to support pregnant women to stop smoking through financial incentives and other kinds of support.

So, when I started doing research on these preventable risk factors, it was the mid late 1990s and, at that time, just over one in four people smoked. It’s now around one in 10.

And that means we, with policymakers and the NHS, have saved 10s of thousands of lives.

Professor Rosie McEachan:

Social sciences is the study of not only people but also policy and place, and what it helps us to do is to take those really powerful findings, particularly from health research, and think about, right, how do we translate that into real change within our communities.

My name is Professor Rosie McEachan, I’m the Director of the Born in Bradford Research Programme.

Born in Bradford is one of the biggest longitudinal health studies in the UK. We follow the health of over 60,000 Bradfordians, parents and children, to understand why some families stay healthy and why other families fall ill.

But one of the most important areas that we’ve been focusing on is the influence of the environments in which we live.

We find that mums who are living in areas where there’s higher pollution are having children who are born with a lower birth weight. 30% of asthma cases of children in the City of Bradford are due to traffic-related air pollution.

We’ve been working with policymakers to collectively come up with the solutions that we need to implement.

So, as a result of all of this broad research that we do, in Bradford we now have investment into green spaces in the city and we’ve also got one of the most ambitious clean air zones in the UK.

And what we find is just after one year of the clean air zone being in place, so we estimate there’s around 700 fewer GP appointments every month in Bradford and that’s resulting in £30,000 saved every month to the NHS.