‘Find your village’ – culturally-coordinated understanding and action for communities with migrational heritage.
Funding:
NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire ICB Research Capability Funding.
What is the problem?
Migration to an urban, western environment may challenge families, especially coming from cultures where ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Children born in the UK to marginalised refugee or forced migrant families, after highly stressed pregnancies, often with poor housing, few resources, and a local environment that feels unsafe, without the cultural and social structures to support them learning through play and interaction, responsibility and boundaries, may miss out on key developmental opportunities. Stories of fear, uncertainty and isolation point to the cultural clash of moving from a communal to an individualistic society, along with multiple sources of stress, and impoverished, frightening environments [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2019.01.019].
Local migrant children are referred for developmental difficulties more frequently than their white British peers. For example, African diaspora and Somali pre-school children from migrant backgrounds are 4-6 times more likely to be referred for possible autism [https://doi.org/10.1111/cch.13009]. These early developmental difficulties point towards adverse outcomes for education, employment and public safety. In contrast, strong, sustainable communities build wellbeing, security and social connections, which improve life chances.
This connects richly with ICB strategy: tackling inequalities, strengthening building blocks of wellbeing, working preventively, alongside/with communities and assets, investing in the first 1001 days, refining and embedding trauma-informed practices, creating a network of volunteer champions, and influencing purchasing/commissioning.
What is the aim of the research?
This research aims to enable and support marginalised children and families with migrational heritage to thrive. We believe answers to the above inequalities can be found in the undervalued traditions, cultures, knowledge and experiences of our global communities. We aim to show how community groups, the voluntary sector and government agencies can all contribute to social and environmental change that builds a ‘village’. We believe they can achieve this by coordinating to activate ‘latent assets’ – assets present in families’ and communities’ heritage and experience, but currently hidden, suppressed or silenced that will reduce inequality and marginalisation, and improve outcomes for children, families, communities and neighbourhoods, and foster linkage between communities and agencies, health and wider sectors.
How will this be achieved?
The NIHR PDG and RCPCH highlight for child health and wellbeing research – Competition Brief offers the opportunity to build a national team around inequality-reducing investment in maternity and early childhood.
Our aim is to reduce inequalities in nutrition, health and wellbeing, early child development, youth outcomes, community/neighbourhood networks and partnership with services for families with migrant heritage. We will use this opportunity to build a collaborative team and programme that draws from research in Bristol, London, Bradford and Leicester. This will build on examples of maternity and early childhood peer support approaches such as ‘Find your village’ across the country seeking social and environmental change.
Our research is designed to construct a persuasive NIHR PDG application about changes in policy, practice and commissioning that involve, resource and connect services with communities with migrant heritage to build trust and share responsibility:
- We will integrate experience from the collaborating centres.
- We will use the ‘Born in Bradford’ prospective birth cohort (with a highly diverse and migrant population) to explore possible associations of maternal ethnicity, migration status and wellbeing/stress/isolation in pregnancy with pre-school child learning and wellbeing measures.
- We will prepare for use of the national e-Child database.
We will undertake public involvement meetings to discuss our proposed approaches.
Who is leading the research?
This research is led by Dr Tom Allport, Consultant Paediatrician and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, University of Bristol.
Further information
For more information or to get involved with this project, please email bnssg.research@nhs.net