Responsive Project
Routes: New ways to talk about Covid-19 for better health. Focus on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and migrant workers
Overview
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and migrant workers often experience worse health than the general population, with existing inequalities exacerbated further by the covid-19 pandemic. Understanding health experiences within these communities and co-designing solutions is vital to improve health equity and health services.
The project involves participatory research with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and with migrant workers in precarious jobs, using our ‘[DEPTH]' approach, to identify and address barriers to good health. We work with policymakers, healthcare staff, and communities to generate rigorous evidence and to co-produce research and solutions that are tailored, meaningful, feasible and effective.
Our approach involves community members as co-researchers to ensure that we ask the right questions, contextualise the responses properly, and find solutions together. We are exploring real life experiences relevant to Covid-19 risk, prevention and response, and co-producing solutions via dialogues about the findings. By co-producing the research, we will understand specifics of health experiences and needs, and how best to address them. While we are focusing on Covid-19 prevention, we anticipate that our findings will also be transferable to other areas of health.
Outcomes
By using our DEPTH approach, particularly as it relates to community participation in Covid-19 health responses [view here] we will generate rigorous evidence, and co-produce recommendations that are evidence-based, address real community concerns, and are acceptable and feasible.
We aim to promote dialogue and generate knowledge, with Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, and migrant worker communities, to understand:
- experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic;
- experiences and views of public health responses to Covid-19;
- when and why people do or do not engage with different elements of Covid-19 prevention, taking account of broader issues with engagement with health services;
- how people's living and working conditions affect their ability to protect themselves from Covid-19 and to engage with health initiatives, focusing on test and trace;
- understand the broader social context affecting people’s lives and how this affects health and use of health services.
Using evidence from the project we will then engage in dialogues with communities and other key stakeholders to co-produce recommendations relevant to the public health response to Covid-19.
Outputs