Projects & Research Partnerships

Local Health and Global Profits

Working alongside local governments, local populations, public health practitioners and civil society groups, this project aims to understand the building blocks, including commercial factors, impacting on communities' health.

Introduction

The commercial sector is a largely poorly understood influence on local health and in some cases can have a disproportionate impact on population health. Around 40% of chronic disease deaths are linked to tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and fossil fuels – all commercial products.

The Local Health and Global Profits project is part of a wider project called Population Health Improvement UK. This is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary project with a mission to discover innovative and inclusive ways to improve the health of people, places and communities, and to reduce health inequalities by developing and evaluating long-lasting and environmentally sustainable interventions.

Working alongside local governments, local populations, public health practitioners and civil society groups, the project aims to understand the building blocks, including commercial factors, impacting on communities' health. The overarching research question that the project addresses is: What are the effects of taking a systems approach to understanding and addressing the upstream (commercial) determinants of health at local level?

Work packages

The project is split into seven different work packages (WPs). The University of Sheffield team is heavily involved in two of these (WP4 and WP7).

WP1: Identifying system structures and levers
WP2: Actions: identifying, evaluating and categorising options for local authorities to address upstream commercial determinants of health
WP3: Understanding facilitators and barriers to upstream action and developing resources to address barriers
WP4: Develop and implement tools to assess health, economic and inequality impacts of actions
WP5: Implementation
WP6: Evaluation
WP7: Knowledge exchange and scale-up

The team here at the University of Sheffield is mainly focusing on WP4, with an aim to compile and apply health, environmental and economic evidence and data, and use new methods to develop and implement impact assessment tools for use by local authorities.

Find out more on the Population Health Improvement UK website.