Discover insights into a key policy challenge - reducing inequalities and improving life expectancy across Scotland. Using the SIPHER Decision Support Tool, we modelled various strategies to enhance life expectancy and reduce disparities, tailoring these for Scotland's local authorities. Key findings reveal which actions could have the greatest impact over the next decade. 

This is a comprehensive, data-driven guide for policymakers, communities, and health professionals seeking sustainable change.

Read: Balancing improvements in average life expectancy with inequality reductions across Scotland: An inclusive economy trade-off study. October 2024.

What happens when a country takes bold action to combat child poverty? This SIPHER report explores the potential mental health benefits for Scotland’s adult population if child poverty targets set under the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 are met. 

Key findings reveal that achieving both absolute and relative poverty targets by 2030 could:

• Improve the mental health of adults in Scotland.
• Reduce the number of adults at risk of depressive disorders by 23,000.
• Enhance quality of life, particularly for adults in families meeting child poverty priority criteria, like lone-parent households or families with young children.

Our modelling underscores the transformative potential of targeted interventions, not just for children but for Scotland’s broader population. It also highlights the ripple effects on public health, quality of life, and health service demand.  Discover how modelling tools can guide impactful decision-making for a healthier Scotland.

Read: Modelling the Scottish Child Poverty Targets: Estimating the Effect on Adult Mental Health. December 2024

Our FREE online lunchtime sessions (30-40 minutes) include a Q&A session offer informative talks on key aspects of our work and resources.

Register to attend SIPHER Webinars

Housing as a social determinant of health: Insights from the SIPHER consortium
📅 20 February, 12:30 – 1:10 PM
Housing is a key social determinant of health and plays an important role in shaping public health outcomes. we offer an overview of SIPHER’s qualitative and quantitative research on the relationship between housing and health. 
Presenter: Dr Lisa Garnham  SIPHER Researcher supporting Understanding Policy Processes and Evidence Needs (Workstrand 1) and is a Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde.

Evaluation of a complex systems science programme: Learning from the SIPHER Consortium
📅 26 February, 12:30 – 1:10 PM
Evaluations of complex systems science programmes are uncommon. This webinar will focus on how SIPHER started, grew and developed to deliver on its ambitions over 5 years.
Presenter: Dr Liz Such supports the SIPHER Evaluation and Engagement (Workstrand 8), using a systems approach and is an Anne McLaren Fellow at the School of Health Sciences, University of Nottingham.

Missed a previous SIPHER webinar, want to revisit it, or share it with others?  

Catch up on all our recordings at SIPHER videos and Webinars

In this blog from Hugh Rice, Andreas Hoehn and Nik Lomax discuss SIPHER’s Inclusive Economy (Ward Level) Dataset, a powerful new resource for understanding economic inclusion across Great Britain’s electoral wards.

Developed using the SIPHER Synthetic Population, this dataset covers 13 key indicators (2019–2021) on income, employment, housing, education, and more. It also includes demographic and wellbeing data to provide policy makers with valuable insights into local health inequalities.  An interactive data visualization tool is available to support research and policy development using this data and in early December Hugh hosted a webinar to showcase these new SIPHER resources.

• Read Blog: Inclusive Economy Indicators for Electoral Wards
• Listen to Webinar: Measuring Economic Inclusion

All SIPHER blogs>

The SIPHER team gathered for our very final in person full team meeting in Sheffield on 13-14 November 2024.

Our enthusiasm and commitment remained as strong as ever as we sought opportunities to maximise the value of SIPHER’s outputs, including through further cross-workstream interactions, and discussed ways to ensure a lasting and meaningful legacy.

"Eliciting distributional preferences for health and wellbeing outcomes” on SIPHER’s 6.2 inequality aversion work was part of the University of Melbourne Health Economics Seminar series in December 2024.Presented by Prof Aki Tsuchiya SIPHER Lead for our Societal Valuation (Workstrand 6).

Aki was also invited to take part in the "Strengthening International Evidence on Health Inequality Aversion" workshop held in November at Fondation Brocher, Geneva. The event brought together global experts to address health equity and social justice in decision-making and aimed to bridge the gap between research and policy, moving methods from technical development to practical implementation.  

We look forward to welcoming our research and policy stakeholders, old and new, to join the SIPHER team as we mark the end of our successful project with this special SHOWCASE event. 

If you have not yet confirmed your attendance and are interested in joining us on 6 March in Manchester, please contact the SIPHER team sipher@glasgow.ac.uk before 3 February 2025. We would be happy to provide further details, subject to availability.

This international symposium to be held at the University of St Andrews in June 2025 will focus on innovative research on migrants and their descendants. Topics may include mortality and health, housing and residential mobility, employment and education, as well as family formation and fertility.

Submission Abstracts are welcomed by 18 February 2025. No registration fee and limited funding for early career researchers is available. Questions may be directed to Andreas Hoehn andreas.hoehn@glasgow.ac.uk.

Learn more: MigrantLife Project

A reminder that we want to hear from you if you have used our SIPHER Employment and Health Evidence & Gap Map. Whether you accessed it for research or policy work, tell us how you found it and what you used it for. Your feedback will help us improve our tools and resources.  Please direct your comments marked EGM Feedback to sipher@glasgow.ac.uk           

Explore:  SIPHER Employment and Health Evidence and Gap Map

Join the Policy Modelling for Health team & explore incorporating social preferences into public health decisions using Multi-Criteria Decision Modelling.

This funded PhD will explore the possibility of using preferences elicited from members of the public taking a social perspective as citizens (as opposed to a personal perspective as private consumers), develop a new protocol to incorporate these into a formal Multi-Criteria Decision Modelling approach and then test in a real-world case study. Supervised by Prof. Aki Tsuchiya & Prof. Robin Purshouse.

Closing date: Monday 3 February 2025

Full details and application

The digital divide in health research -  Increasingly discrete choice experiments are conducted online, with little consideration of the digitally-excluded, who are unable to participate. Becky Field, SIPHER qualitative research associate supporting Societal Valuation (Workstrand 6) and her co-authors note that if such online data are to inform policymaking we need clarity about how views might differ across this ‘digital divide’. 

Read more in our  latest study in Value in Health (2024) - Exploring Social Preferences for Health and Wellbeing Across the Digital Divide.

Housing market dynamics - co-authors Corinna Elsenbroich and Alison Heppenstall employed an agent-based model to reveal the complex relationship between mortgages, house prices, and tenant rents across the UK housing market. It revealed rising mortgage rates can reduced house prices but sharply increase rents within five years, while a lower loan-to-value ratio can drive down house prices.

Read: A behavioural agent-based model for housing markets: impact of financial shocks in UK. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation Oct 2024

All SIPHER publications>

Congratulations to Dr Robert Clay, SIPHER researcher who successfully passed his PhD viva in November. His research “Modelling the Social Determinants of Health at the Individual and Neighbourhood Level” was commended by his examiners for its technical breadth and strong policy application. Rob is part of our Policy Microsimulation (Workstrand 5) which seeks to model the impacts of environment and policy on the characteristics of individuals and households.

Meet the SIPHER team>