Reducing Inequalities in Communities (RIC)
Across Bradford district and Craven, there are significant health inequalities in communities and the gap in how long people will live is stark.
People in the most deprived areas of our district are living with more ill health and dying earlier.
To address this stark inequality, the Reducing Inequalities in Communities (RIC) programme was set up in 2019 as a five-year programme to test out various interventions in central Bradford. The programme oversaw the delivery of 21 projects, involving a range of partners. Watch this short video to find out more about the RIC programme.
What we’ve learnt
RIC and its associated projects, has allowed us to develop and learn from our local approach to tackling health inequalities in Bradford District and Craven.
This learning has been captured via:
- our RIC learning report
- reflective blog by Dr Sohail Abbas
- RIC Learning Week of bitesize online sessions
- through our Reducing Inequalities Alliance
You can also watch this short film which highlights the learning from the past 5 years and pulls out key themes across the programme:
Human stories
As part of our RIC evaluation, we collected stories from local people involved in the RIC projects to hear the impact the interventions have had on them.
The health gap
Starting in the least deprived area, Wharfedale, life expectancy is 87 years for women and 84 years for men. Moving into central Bradford, this dramatically reduces. In the most deprived area, Manningham, people’s life expectancy here is around 10 years less than Wharfedale.
If we take away the time people are living with poor mental wellbeing and ill health – we get what is known as healthy life expectancy. And the gap gets bigger – people living in Manningham have 20 years less healthy life than those in Wharfedale.
Bradford Inequalities Research Unit
From the start we knew we needed to be sure that interventions in the RIC programme made a real difference to our population. This is why we worked closely with Born in Bradford (BiB), the University of York and Queen Mary University of London to create the Bradford Inequalities Research Unit (BIRU). BIRU helps us to:
- understand the causes of ill health and inequalities in central Bradford
- identify areas to prioritise
- build an evidence base of what works
As part of this approach, BIRU is also explored ‘community readiness’ in different projects to make sure interventions are as effective as possible. You can view the BIRU final report from the programme here.
Inequalities blogs and articles
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More information to help you
“An excellent approach taken to Reducing Inequalities in Communities (RIC) via a system wide whole life course approach to tackling health inequalities. Inspiring!” – HSJ