Violence, Health and Society: VISION
Lead Research Organisation:
City, University of London
Department Name: School of Social Sciences
Abstract
Violence causes harms to health. The harms to mental health can be more long-lasting than the immediate harms to physical health and have consequences that reverberate through a person's life impacting on their functioning in society. Reducing such 'upstream' determinants of poor mental health would significantly improve the health of the population. This would reduce health inequalities since being a victim of violence is more prevalent among those who are already disadvantaged.
The Consortium would investigate the effectiveness of interventions to reduce violence and, thus, reduce health inequalities. Within the field of violence, we have special interest in domestic and sexual violence because these are significant causes of inequalities in mental health, which have been relatively neglected in the scientific and statistical evidence base. We address how to mainstream these issues across multiple sectors rather than seeing them as only of specialised concern.
Multiple institutions are relevant to preventing violence. They include not only health services, but also criminal law enforcement (most violence is a crime), civil law (e.g. domestic protection orders), specialised services (Third Sector organisations that help victim/survivors of violence), and governmental bodies concerned with law, policy and data quality. The connections between violence and ill health are complicated since they are mediated by many of these institutions. Identifying these connections would aid the development of more effective interventions while a complex systems analysis captures the adaptive behaviour between these systems.
The data needed to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions is currently weak. This is partly because each specialised academic discipline and profession has a different way of measuring violence, which makes cooperation across these differences difficult. Not only do we need harmonised core metrics for the evaluation of interventions and cross-sector cost-benefit comparisons, we also need to adapt and extend our metrics to capture newly identified forms of abuse such as that facilitated by technology. The Consortium aims to improve the measurement framework and data availability to aid the evaluation of interventions. This is premised on cooperation between academics and practitioners. The project seeks to identify profiles of persons and incidents exposed to violence and link data from multiple services and surveys. We would assist services to make their own data more useable and more available. This involves care and attention to issues of data protection and the development of bespoke agreements on data sharing that respect communities that generate data.
We would unlock the potential in multiple data sources rather than collect new data. These datasets include major national surveys such as the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, and the Crime Survey for England and Wales, and also administrative data sets from professions and practitioners, including the police, solicitors, health and specialised services. These datasets will be linked in a new integrated dataset and provide an evidence base upon which a cost-benefit framework and risk assessment tools can be developed.
With the linked data and new tools, we would assess key interventions. These are interventions at the level of institutions and systems. Our focus is the prevention of violence in the population rather than the treatment of trauma in individuals. The Consortium seeks to mainstream evidence of the significance of violence for health in policy making. We would engage with decision-makers concerned with the commissioning of services and policy makers concerned with priorities for public expenditure, as well as wider publics.
The aim is to reduce the harm to health, especially mental health, by identifying the most effective and cost-effective interventions to reduce violence in the population.
The Consortium would investigate the effectiveness of interventions to reduce violence and, thus, reduce health inequalities. Within the field of violence, we have special interest in domestic and sexual violence because these are significant causes of inequalities in mental health, which have been relatively neglected in the scientific and statistical evidence base. We address how to mainstream these issues across multiple sectors rather than seeing them as only of specialised concern.
Multiple institutions are relevant to preventing violence. They include not only health services, but also criminal law enforcement (most violence is a crime), civil law (e.g. domestic protection orders), specialised services (Third Sector organisations that help victim/survivors of violence), and governmental bodies concerned with law, policy and data quality. The connections between violence and ill health are complicated since they are mediated by many of these institutions. Identifying these connections would aid the development of more effective interventions while a complex systems analysis captures the adaptive behaviour between these systems.
The data needed to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions is currently weak. This is partly because each specialised academic discipline and profession has a different way of measuring violence, which makes cooperation across these differences difficult. Not only do we need harmonised core metrics for the evaluation of interventions and cross-sector cost-benefit comparisons, we also need to adapt and extend our metrics to capture newly identified forms of abuse such as that facilitated by technology. The Consortium aims to improve the measurement framework and data availability to aid the evaluation of interventions. This is premised on cooperation between academics and practitioners. The project seeks to identify profiles of persons and incidents exposed to violence and link data from multiple services and surveys. We would assist services to make their own data more useable and more available. This involves care and attention to issues of data protection and the development of bespoke agreements on data sharing that respect communities that generate data.
We would unlock the potential in multiple data sources rather than collect new data. These datasets include major national surveys such as the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, and the Crime Survey for England and Wales, and also administrative data sets from professions and practitioners, including the police, solicitors, health and specialised services. These datasets will be linked in a new integrated dataset and provide an evidence base upon which a cost-benefit framework and risk assessment tools can be developed.
With the linked data and new tools, we would assess key interventions. These are interventions at the level of institutions and systems. Our focus is the prevention of violence in the population rather than the treatment of trauma in individuals. The Consortium seeks to mainstream evidence of the significance of violence for health in policy making. We would engage with decision-makers concerned with the commissioning of services and policy makers concerned with priorities for public expenditure, as well as wider publics.
The aim is to reduce the harm to health, especially mental health, by identifying the most effective and cost-effective interventions to reduce violence in the population.
Technical Summary
The vision underlying the Consortium on 'Violence, Health and Society' is that improving the knowledge base on violence and using this knowledge to inform changes to policy and practice will improve population health and reduce health inequalities. It will do so by acting on 'upstream' harms to health caused by violence. Research on such interventions is developing but is held back by weak theory and weak data. Theory is weak because it is often focused on individuals rather than on the system level. We will develop systems analysis using complexity theory that allows consideration of feedback loops that generate wicked problems and perverse outcomes. We will embed questions about the significance of multiple intersecting inequalities including gender and ethnicity into the theory underpinning the systems framework. Data is weak because, collected by multiple agencies for their own purposes, it is fragmented and incommensurable. We will work with data providers to develop survey and administrative data in health, justice and specialised services and translate it into our shared measurement framework. We will curate existing datasets rather than collect new data. We will use natural language processing to turn free-text narratives into quantitative data. We will integrate data using probabilistic individual profiles, which offers a powerful new route to data linkage that avoids the dangers of identifying real people. We will interrogate our newly improved data with questions about the nature of the causal pathways connecting violence, health and society to identify promising sites of intervention. We will develop cost-benefit analysis and evaluate interventions, using findings to build the theory of change. With our partners in health, justice, specialised services and government, we will seek to embed the new measurement in practice, to enable evidence-based feedback on developments to reduce violence and thereby improve health and reduce health inequalities.
Publications
Brunckhorst O
(2020)
Depression, anxiety, and suicidality in patients with prostate cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies
in Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases
Perera G
(2021)
Factors associated with slow progression of cognitive impairment following first dementia diagnosis.
in International journal of geriatric psychiatry
Davis KAS
(2021)
Aspirin in people with dementia, long-term benefits, and harms: a systematic review.
in European journal of clinical pharmacology
Das-Munshi J
(2021)
All-cause and cause-specific mortality in people with mental disorders and intellectual disabilities, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: cohort study.
in The Lancet regional health. Europe
Hughes K
(2021)
Health and financial costs of adverse childhood experiences in 28 European countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis
in The Lancet Public Health
Greig F
(2021)
Loneliness in older adult mental health services during the COVID-19 pandemic and before: Associations with disability, functioning and pharmacotherapy.
in International journal of geriatric psychiatry
Mirza L
(2021)
Investigating the association between physical health comorbidities and disability in individuals with severe mental illness.
in European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists
Soldner F
(2021)
The Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology
Rush K
(2021)
Risk of First General Hospital Admissions for Self-Harm Among People With Personality Disorder: A Retrospective Cohort Study.
in Journal of personality disorders
Macdonald A
(2021)
Continuity of care and mortality in people with schizophrenia.
in BJPsych open
Jayasinghe L
(2021)
Quoted text in the mental healthcare electronic record: an analysis of the distribution and content of single-word quotations
in BMJ Open
Tanczer L
(2021)
'I feel like we're really behind the game': perspectives of the United Kingdom's intimate partner violence support sector on the rise of technology-facilitated abuse
in Journal of Gender-Based Violence
Mascio A
(2021)
Cognitive Impairments in Schizophrenia: A Study in a Large Clinical Sample Using Natural Language Processing.
in Frontiers in digital health
Irving J
(2021)
Using Natural Language Processing on Electronic Health Records to Enhance Detection and Prediction of Psychosis Risk.
in Schizophrenia bulletin
Yorganci E
(2021)
Quality indicators for dementia and older people nearing the end of life: A systematic review
in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
Khapre S
(2021)
An evaluation of symptom domains in the 2 years before pregnancy as predictors of relapse in the perinatal period in women with severe mental illness.
in European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists
Soysal P
(2021)
Weight loss in Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies: Impact on mortality and hospitalization by dementia subtype.
in International journal of geriatric psychiatry
Bishara D
(2021)
Centrally Acting Anticholinergic Drugs Used for Urinary Conditions Associated with Worse Outcomes in Dementia.
in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association
Tanczer L
(2021)
I Feel Like We're Really Behind the Game': Perspectives of the United Kingdom's Intimate Partner Violence Support Sector on the Rise of Technology-Facilitated Abuse
in SSRN Electronic Journal
Chaturvedi J
(2021)
Hospital admissions for dental disorders in patients with severe mental illness in Southeast London: A register-based cohort study.
in European journal of oral sciences
Walby S
(2022)
What is femicide? The United Nations and the measurement of progress in complex epistemic systems
in Current Sociology
Bland M
(2022)
Describing Patterns of Known Domestic Abuse Among Different Ethnic Groups.
in Frontiers in psychology
Parmar M
(2022)
Associations between loneliness and acute hospitalisation outcomes among patients receiving mental healthcare in South London: a retrospective cohort study.
in Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology
Barrow-Grint Katy
(2022)
Policing Domestic Abuse: Risk, Policy, and Practice
McManus S
(2022)
Intimate partner violence, suicidality, and self-harm: a probability sample survey of the general population in England.
in The lancet. Psychiatry
Tomczak P
(2022)
Bereaved Family 'Involvement' in (Prisoner) Death Investigations: Whose 'Satisfaction'?
in Social & Legal Studies
A. Cook E
(2022)
Re-imagining what counts as femicide
in Current Sociology
Wu H
(2022)
A survey on clinical natural language processing in the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2022
in npj Digital Medicine
Jackson J
(2022)
Using Saturated Count Models for User-Friendly Synthesis of Large Confidential Administrative Databases
in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society
Stewart
(2022)
How to Do Research: and How to Be a Researcher
Barrow-Grint K
(2022)
Policing Domestic Abuse - Risk, Policy, and Practice
Wood SK
(2022)
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Their Relationship with Poor Sexual Health Outcomes: Results from Four Cross-Sectional Surveys.
in International journal of environmental research and public health
Hardcastle K
(2022)
Maternal adverse childhood experiences and their association with preterm birth: secondary analysis of data from universal health visiting.
in BMC pregnancy and childbirth
Garbett H
(2022)
Domestic violence and injuries: prevalence and patterns-a pilot database study to identify suspected cases in a UK major trauma centre.
in Injury prevention : journal of the International Society for Child and Adolescent Injury Prevention
Cook E
(2022)
Risk, responsibility, and choice in research ethics.
in The lancet. Psychiatry
Naismith H
(2022)
Suicidal ideation in dementia: associations with neuropsychiatric symptoms and subtype diagnosis.
in International psychogeriatrics