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Two researchers from the Sheffield Addictions Research Group (SARG), Dr Charlotte Head and Dr Esther Chanakira, will showcase innovative local-level tools for policy design, including economic modelling and wastewater surveillance, at the European Public Health (EPH) Conference in Helsinki from 11–14 November 2025.

The EPH Conference is a major annual event that brings together more than 3,000 public health professionals, policymakers, and researchers from across Europe and beyond.

The core focus of SARG's conference contribution is the introduction of a new economic modelling framework developed as part of the UKRI-funded Local Health and Global Profits research programme. The programme uses an integrated systems approach to create tools and evidence, including economic models, that enable local authorities to identify, implement and evaluate effective upstream policies to mitigate the influence of harmful commercial determinants on health, wellbeing and equity.

Economic modelling for upstream policy evaluation

Dr Head and Dr Chanakira will jointly present a workshop, 'Estimating wellbeing and long-term costs and benefits to limit commercial determinants of health', as part of a dedicated session led by the Local Health and Global Profits research consortium: 'Strengthening local responses to the commercial determinants of health'.

The workshop introduces an integrated economic modelling approach that supports local authorities in designing and evaluating upstream policies. The framework moves beyond traditional models that focus narrowly on short-term health savings. Instead, it estimates both the wellbeing impacts and long-term economic benefits of interventions, simulating their effects on population health, productivity and equity over time.

The presentation will share preliminary findings from case studies, illustrating how the model can estimate the distributional effects of interventions across population subgroups. This proposed approach offers a promising path to support local authorities with evidence-informed strategies that can realign local systems towards health, sustainability and equity.

Wastewater analysis for monitoring local substance use

Dr Charlotte Head will also present a poster titled 'Wastewater-based epidemiology for local tobacco and nicotine use with small-area estimations.'

This research addresses a critical gap for local public health: the lack of accessible and representative small-area data on smoking and vaping needed for targeted interventions. Traditional real-world data is often costly or unavailable.

The work presents a novel surveillance technique that combines two powerful methodologies:

• Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE): Analysis of municipal sewage was used to successfully detect eight different tobacco and nicotine metabolites (such as cotinine and anabasine) in York, offering a detailed, community-wide signal of substance use.
• Synthetic Populations: Advanced statistical methods were used to build a local synthetic population, yielding independent estimates of health-risk behavioural factors.

The preliminary findings showed that the estimated smoking prevalence for the City of York derived from the synthetic population was supported and validated by the detection of the metabolites in the local wastewater.

This combined approach offers significant potential to establish a nationwide surveillance network, providing nuanced, neighbourhood-level insights into prevalence and emerging trends. This capability can directly inform public health decision-making, allowing local authorities to allocate resources for targeted interventions and monitor the effectiveness of public health campaigns in near real-time.

A related news story on this conference contribution is available on the Population Health Improvement UK website: Local Health and Global Profits researchers address commercial determinants of health at major European conference.