This op-ed was originally published online by Northern Agenda on 26 February 2024
Dr Peter O’Brien, Executive Director of YU
I passionately believe a more productive, more prosperous, and more resilient, Yorkshire, should be founded on creating and sustaining a healthier population and workforce of today and tomorrow – and universities have a crucial role to play in this.
Yorkshire and Humber has the third lowest percentage of people in employment in England, and the third lowest life expectancy in England, with £13.2bn a year lost in productivity in the UK as a result of health inequalities in the North.
The new ‘Empowering local places for health and prosperity: new perspectives from Yorkshire and the Humber’ White Paper (Friday’s launch event is pictured below) calls for a devolved place-based model and reinforces key analysis and evidence on the relationships between health and inclusive economic growth.
It illustrates the pivotal role that the member institutions of Yorkshire Universities (YU) can play in realising this over-arching ambition in a region where 37,000 students study medicine / health-related subjects, and where 10 out of 12 of our universities offer health-related courses.
The White Paper, the latest output in YU’s campaign with Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber and the NHS Confederation, is the perfect platform to build on our innovative collaborations.
Crucially, many of our academics are embedded within the region, working closely with policymakers and business, and their research is shaped increasingly with and for our local communities.
Poor health should not be left just to the NHS to tackle – this is a recipe for inequalities to widen – but instead health improvements must be addressed at source, with the causes of ill-health eradicated before they take root and mushroom.
This means improving what some call the wider, but in fact are the ‘core’ determinants of health, such as infrastructure, housing, employment, poverty, disability, discrimination, air pollution and climate change, and education and skills attainment. Yorkshire Universities and our members have an interest and stake in working with the Government and partners in the region to ensure these core determinants of health feature in the missions and plans to improve the lives of people and places in Yorkshire.
With 112,000 vacancies nationally across the health workforce, Universities UK has published a five-point plan for healthcare education and training proposed to turn ambitions into reality.
The Workforce Plan’s success hinges on a joint endeavour between education and healthcare providers, with universities both educating the next generation of healthcare professionals, and also driving innovation that can improve health outcomes.
Secondly, universities are catalysts for research, innovation (R&I) and the application of knowledge in healthcare and health technologies, working with public and private sectors to drive new products and processes to tackle ill-health, disease and improve the lives of individuals in the region and beyond.
Covid-19 saw universities in Yorkshire step up to support the response to and recovery from the pandemic. Our members provided specialist equipment to the NHS. Medical and allied health students entered the health and care system, working alongside practitioners, and undertaking key roles that created the space for more doctors and nurses to work on the ‘frontline’.
We are blessed with world-class R&I assets in the region include the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, the Institute for Data Analytics, the Leeds Centre for Personalised Medicine and Health, the Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, Nexus Leeds, York Science Park, Wolfson Centre, Bradford, and four of the eleven national Medtech and Invitro diagnostics Co-operatives.
And thirdly, universities are ‘anchor institutions’ – institutions with deep roots embedded in specific places that, through scale, can coordinate economic and social activity in pursuit of shared objectives – and to better serve these 5.4 million residents. There are 215,000 students at universities in Yorkshire, with around 71,000 graduates each year.
YU acts as a convenor for universities in Yorkshire to act as part of the civic fabric of governance in West, South, North and East Yorkshire, working closely with Mayors, Combined Authorities, local government, and new and emergent institutions.
Research on the core determinants of health, especially health inequalities, runs through the core of YU and its members.
It is typified by the Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network (Y-PERN). It provides a unique infrastructure to better connect policymakers with academic expertise at all YU institutions and is a mechanism for co-designing and co-investigating the causes of ill-health, and identifying, in partnership, potential solutions.
Our collective sleeves are rolled up and we’re ready to play a massive part in making this region a healthy and prosperous one.
