The Julian Tudor Hart Annual Lecture Series: ‘DIY Welfare or Silver Bullet: The Place of Community in UK Health Policy in the 21st century

This year’s lecture was presented by Professor Jennie Popay of Lancaster University.

The session was introduced by Professor Ian Rees Jones, Director of the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD).

This event was sponsored by Public Health Wales and Cardiff University, in partnership with the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) and The Cardiff Institute of Society, Health and Wellbeing (CISHeW).

About the Speaker

Jennie Popay is Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Lancaster University and Deputy Director of the NIHR funded School for Public Health Research.

She has worked as a teacher, policy makers and researcher in academia and in the public and voluntary sectors in the UK, Africa and New Zealand.

Her research interests include: the social determinants of health and health equity; the evaluation of complex ‘natural’ policy experiments’; and community empowerment as a route to greater social justice and health equality. She is currently leading an evaluation of a large-scale community empowerment initiative in England and a programme of work developing and evaluating the social and health impact of action to enhance system resilience in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

She has recently completed an evaluation of the impact on health inequalities and their social determinants of the English New Deal for Communities regeneration programmes, which has a particular focus on NDC approaches to community engagement in programme design and delivery.

With funding from the Medical Research Council she also led a team that produced online guidance on how to assess the impact of public involvement in research. She ran the global Social Exclusion Knowledge Network supporting the WHO Commission on the Social Determinant of Health and has held public appointments with the Commission on Health Improvement, the Commission on Patient and Public Involvement in Health, the Bevan Commission in Wales, and was the inaugural chair of the UK charity, The People’s Health Trust.