ReCITE

The ReCITE project will blend creativity with healthcare: focusing on building storytelling into community and health systems to address mistrust and promote wellbeing. The project has a wide range of academic and creative partners who will work in collaboration to engage people living in Liverpool, Knowsley and South Sefton, and will use the power of stories to promote health prevention and mental wellbeing in some of the region’s poorest areas.

The consortium has created a Theory of Change and expects commissioners and policymakers will see the benefits of scaling up and sustaining a strategic creative health approach that builds community trust and increases health equity.

Storytelling is a way of collecting data, highlighting inequities, providing health messages to communities and redirecting public agendas to better promote health equity. Liverpool has a long history of strong and active communities, and vibrant creativity but also has entrenched health inequalities that mean many local people live shorter lives with fewer years of good health than they should.

Routine health interventions such as cancer screening and childhood immunisation have fallen well below national targets and there is an increasing burden of poor mental wellbeing and of mistrust in government and public health information.

Our overall aim is to scale-up and sustain the integration of storytelling into community and health system efforts to address these gaps and promote health equity by building a legacy of trust and collaborative action between communities, storytelling assets, and health providers in the poorest areas of Merseyside.

Working with communities in Merseyside to improve health outcomes

We are partnering with the Integrated Care Board (ICB) and Director of Public Health Liverpool to focus on the most challenged areas across Liverpool, Knowsley, and South Sefton. By working closely with community champions, we'll target two key areas:

Preventive healthcare: This includes encouraging essential services like immunisations and cancer screenings.

Wellbeing support: We'll promote early intervention to help individuals avoid serious mental health issues.

_{The title of the diagram is “Building a legacy of trust and collaborative action: putting an end to silos”. It is at the top of the image and in the colour purple. Underneath the title is a picture of the project’s intervention wheel, which describes the five different pillars which will be used during the project’s intervention work. The wheel is depicted as a large, multi-coloured circle with the words “communities, health sector, and creative sector” outlining it. The numbers 1-5 are within the circle and surround the words “Trust and Health Equity” in the centre, alongside a doodle of a cloud with the words “mental health” inside. The five numbers are connected to the five pillars, which are listed on the diagram in order: 1 is Storytelling Partnerships for Change. 2 is “Community Innovation Teams: for community-led solutions. 3 is Creative Health Marketplaces for collaborative action. 4 is Advocacy Networks for tackling structural issues. 5 is Learning Events for celebration, voice, evaluation, and scale up.}

Our research objectives

Objective 1: Strengthen capacity with community organisations, people with lived experience (PWLE), health practitioners, and storytellers in research, storytelling, and measuring health equity changes.

Objective 2: Creatively disseminate learning and evidence on the integration of storytelling and community-led approaches, facilitating the scaling up of sustainable and effective approaches.

Objective 3: Co-develop and conduct interdisciplinary research on scaling up and sustaining the integration of storytelling assets within communities and health settings.

Our Theory of Change

This theory of change seeks to achieve multi-sectoral collaboration and address both immediate and underlying issues related to health equity:

Understand: research the challenges and develop solutions for sustainable community involvement.

Drive Change: create multimedia stories with diverse partners to address misinformation and inequities.

Promote Collaboration: connect different sectors through events and projects focused on specific health goals.

Advocate for Change: test networks to address broader issues beyond community interventions.

Measure Impact: develop tools to track progress and assess the effectiveness of their approach.

Circle drawn with colorful pastel chalks, on white background

Case Studies

Anfield & Everton #BeBreastSavvyLiverpool Campaign : The Health Equity Liverpool Project (HELP) is a collaboration between the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Liverpool’s primary care networks (PCNs). In North Liverpool, Dr Simon Abrams heads up the Anfield & Everton Community Innovation Team (CIT) comprised of community organisations, creatives, volunteers, social prescribers, GP practices, nurses, care coordinators and data specialists : Read more