Recite: Building Research by Communities to Address Inequities through Expression

Culture and the arts contribute to health and wellbeing, shifting the focus away from 'disease' to people. Storytelling can be utilised as a way of collecting data, highlighting inequities to policy makers, providing health messages to communities and redirecting public agendas to better promote health equity. Liverpool has a long history of strong and active communities, and vibrant creativity but also has entrenched health inequalities that mean many local people live shorter lives with fewer years of good health than they should. Our recent community insight work with parents of unvaccinated children highlighted mistrust towards government and public health information. Routine preventive and promotive health interventions such as cancer screening and childhood immunisation have fallen well below national targets and there is an increasing burden of poor mental wellbeing.

Our overall aim is to scale-up and sustain the integration of storytelling into community and health system efforts to address these gaps and promote health equity by building a legacy of trust and collaborative action.

We will target people living in the poorest areas of Liverpool, Knowsley and South Sefton with a focus on addressing mistrust in relation to health prevention (cancer screening and childhood immunisation) and mental wellbeing promotion. We will build on existing structures to test a more integrated creative health approach. Communities, creatives and people with lived experience (PWLE) will benefit from training in community-based participatory research and in multi-media immersive storytelling to address mistrust and health inequities. We will catalyse action through the co-development of human stories on mental wellbeing, cancer screening and childhood immunisation. Creative health marketplaces will match creatives with community organisations and the health sector to galvanise new approaches.

Advocacy networks will lobby decision-makers to address structural issues beyond the reach of communities. Community Innovation Teams (CITs) are already integrated within 7 of Liverpool's Primary Care Networks and consist of health providers, volunteers, community champions and PWLEs (and we will add storytellers). We will expand to Knowsley and Sefton. Teams will benefit from training in combining routine GP practice data with behaviour insight data to identify root causes of local health inequities and can access community responsive funds to co-develop creative health solutions. Our Learning Events will be used as platforms for learning, celebration, and recognising good practice. ReCITe is a research consortium and we will work with academics from different backgrounds to evaluate what works and why. Our final evaluation toolkit will help organisations track health equity indicators and provide evidence of the effectiveness of their work.

We expect a legacy of community arts organisations who can attain funding through evidencing the impact of storytelling to commissioners. We further aim to develop a critical mass of storytellers, PWLE, and community organisations with the knowledge and tools to collaborate and train others beyond the programme. We expect that commissioners and policymakers will see the benefits of scaling-up and sustaining a strategic creative health approach which builds community trust and increases health equity.