Glasgow City Region has a long history of economic and health inequality.

Local large-scale investment has often focused on physical regeneration and economic outcomes. But this is set to change thanks to a new project that will ensure that population health is placed at the heart of capital spend decisions.

The Region has been selected by the Health Foundation, to be part of its Economies for Healthier Lives funding programme aimed at strengthening relationships between economic development and health. The project being developed by Glasgow City Region, supported by £347,000 of funding, will create an innovative new toolkit which, once tested, will be used in the development and delivery of capital infrastructure projects at all stages and will ensure that decisions made at every level focus on maximising benefits for better and more equal population health.

GCR will deliver the project working in partnership with the Glasgow Centre for Population and Health (GCPH) and Public Health Scotland.

There will be a four-stage approach with the first stage looking at current decision-making processes on Regional large-scale capital infrastructure projects. Building on this, stage two will use learning gained to develop the new Capital Investment Health Inequalities Impact Assessment (CHIIA) tool and test it on projects of various sizes, types and stages of development. This will include piloting the tool on the Glasgow City Region Housing Retrofit programme, a proposed £10 billion scheme to insulate homes across the Region. The third stage will be about making changes to the tool based on the learning and putting it into everyday practice, through training users and continued monitoring. Finally, stage four will involve bringing together all the project learning and sharing this widely across Scotland and the rest of the UK.   

Evaluation of the project will be ongoing and will be undertaken by GCPH and by external consultants. The project is supported by an Operational Group which meets regularly. A strategic group made up of key people from across economic development, health and the third sector will provide high level guidance and oversight of the project. A Community Panel and Development Cohort will also be established to co-design the CHIIA tool.

For more information, contact Sonia Milne, Project Manager, Economies for Healthier Lives on e-mail: sonia.milne@glasgow.gov.uk or mobile: 07469 400050