Health & Well-Being

This theme harnesses social, economic and individual perspectives to investigate and contextualise the production and construction of health and well-being as a set of life-course experiences. The influence of individuals, families, wider relational networks, and local and national settings are all explored in relation to key wellbeing pathways and the implementation of policy and practice interventions. ILAS programmes are dedicated to illuminating complexities around particularly conditions, notions of interdependency and personhood, the impact of social, health and economic costs, and the appropriateness of biomedical models in public and policy discourses on health. A central element of activity is the exploration of health-related inequity based on the membership of different social categories and different population sub-groups.

Important work streams in the theme of health and wellbeing:

• Health Assessments and Measures: Projects that generate evidence, and evidence-based programmes, for improving health experiences and outcomes for different population groups. Examples of work on this theme include: CORA initiatives to reduce risk activities engaged in by older teenagers, ICAN’s work on designing evidence-based early intervention programmes for children with autism.
• Health Experiences: Work that addresses the drivers of health, health-care utilisation and health related social and economic outcomes. Examples of work on this theme include: HEPAC applied health econometric analyses of determinants of health and factors that impact on health outcomes, CESRD investigation of the relationship between overall care costs and cognitive function in people with dementia
• Determinants and Trajectories: Analyses that track the life-course health pathways for different groups of the population. Examples of work on this theme include: CESRD study on economic, social and health costs in relation to co-morbidities in people with dementia, programmes developed by Speech and Language Therapy on the lived experience of communication disability, HEPAC research on holistic analysis of illness across the life course
• Health Impact Assessment: Activities that inform the development of new measurement protocols and indicators across the different dimensions of subjective and objective health, disability and well-being. Examples of work on this theme include: CFRC evaluation of TUSLA Meitheal programme for assessing