Partnership for Black People's Health: involving Black communities in addressing health inequalities

The aim of this project is to strengthen an existing, diverse network of clinicians, community organisations, academics, and members of the public to explore methods for involving Black African (BACs) and Black Caribbean (BCCs) communities in addressing health inequalities.

We will also extend the network to other partners working on Black People's Health, by which we mean the health of people of Black African and Black Caribbean heritage in the UK. BACs and BCCs suffer a disproportionate burden of health inequalities in all areas of medicine and public health.

This is partly due to racism, which compounds other forms of discrimination and other social and economic inequalities (for example those based on economic class, age, gender, immigration status, sexuality, ethnicity or age). Many interventions to improve health fail to reach BACs and BCCs.

This is partly because of a lack of effective involvement of members of BACs and BCCs in the development of plans for health care, research and public health.

Also, fewer people from BACs and BCCs are employed in research institutions and therefore these communities have less power over how research evidence is produced. This project seeks to address these problems and develop new ways of partnering to involve communities. We will share learning and review our current involvement strategies.

We will recruit two project coordinators of Black African and/or Black Caribbean heritage who will support 11 Involvement Leads in our network.

Each Involvement Lead will carry out involvement activities with members of different BACs and BCCs (of different age, gender, sexuality, health status, citizenship status) and with staff, volunteers and professionals from community organisations working on Black People's Health.

We will strive to include community members that tend to be 'left behind' due to their characteristics or circumstances.

We will use a range of approaches to involve community members and test and review what works best for different people in different situations.

We will then use what we learn to write applications for funding for research and interventions to address health inequalities.

These applications will be co-produced together with members of the partnership, including new members of the public that have become interested in this work after taking part in our involvement activities.

Our other outputs will include: a freely available project report on how to build better partnerships; a publication in an academic journal co-authored by the network and available for all to read; social media content on lessons learned and best practice in community involvement for Black People s Health to be disseminated by the partnership; additional visual, audio or textual material produced during the involvement activities to be disseminated on the team s website, led by members of the public taking part in the project.