Measuring health and well-being with the help of the community

Issue:
The Well North Programme is a multi-centre study focused on reducing inequalities in deprived communities through locally-led interventions and activities. As a locally driven project where the local stakeholders were involved in the programme of work, it was important to involve the community when deciding what to measure.
Description:
As part of the evaluation there was a need to produce a tool to capture health and wellbeing information that was relevant to the specific communities involved in the project. In order to do this, we established that we needed local people to define what they wanted to measure, and we would use evidence synthesis techniques to identify tools that could be used to measure it within the community.
Results:
We formulated the Well North Star, a bespoke spider diagram designed to capture individual level data. The Star is a quantitative tool used to collect individual-level data at an individual, organisational and geographical level. Each arm of
the star represents an important theme, selected for measurement by local people. Identified local stakeholders (including residents, voluntary sector, police and councillors) were invited to workshops in order to decide what issues were
important locally. After group discussions and thematic analysis, up to seven issues were highlighted as the most important in the community. Two of the main issues highlighted within local communities were aspiration and access to local information. After extensive literature search, tools to measure these were insufficient (e.g. aspiration tools focused on aspiration to become famous) and so bespoke tools needed to be created.
Lessons:
When conducting community driven research, it is important to involve representatives from the community in identifying issues that are important to them. There is a gap between what academics and researchers consider important in local communities and what the communities themselves consider important.