Professor Katrina Wyatt

About me:

My research seeks to understand how we can create the conditions for health and wellbeing and address health inequalities in schools, communities and workplaces. Working with service users, patients, carers and communities experiencing significant inequalities to understand the nature of the issues which prevent good health and then supporting the creation of partnerships to develop and deliver research to address these issues. Underpinning the work is an understanding of health as an emergent property which arises from complex social systems and the creation of the conditions for health focuses on altering the nature and qualities of relations within the workplace, school or community. Current research includes understanding the conditions necessary to support death and dying as a social process not a medical event; co-creating health promoting secondary schools and healthy NHS workplaces, developing approaches for supportive consultations for poverty related mental distress and understanding how community 'assets' can address health inequalities. My research also includes methods development including creative methods of engaging so-called ‘seldom-heard voices’ and complex systems approaches to capturing and evidencing system change.

Read more at http://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/research/healthresearch/relationalhealth/

Current research projects include:

• Understanding how community assets can address inequalities - CAN-Do
• Destress: Implementing effective primary care responses to poverty-related mental distress funded by NIHR Inequalities Programme.
• Connecting Communities C2: strengths-based capacity release programme to create the conditions for health and mitigate the impact of inequalities in very low income communities
• Health Promoting Schools: All Saints Saxon Fellowship. Working with seconday schools to develop a whole school approach to supporting healthy diet and physical behaviours of adolescents.
• Realist Evaluation of Safeguarding Family Group Conferencing - understanding what works for whom, and under what circumstances to achieve desired outcomes for families and professionals.

BSc (Hons); PhD Biological Chemistry, University of Essex; Fellowship by Distinction Faculty of Public Health