Gorton Community

Understanding the key health and wellbeing challenges and questions that matter most to local residents

By collaborating closely with the community and exploring grass-roots approaches to research, the Gorton Health Matters project aimed to understand the key health and wellbeing challenges and questions that matter most to local residents. Through methods that emphasise power-sharing, they sought to prioritise issues not only based on research questions but also on community priorities.

Gorton Community Priority Setting Partnership

In traditional research practices, communities are often asked to provide input on specific health topics, like cancer prevention. However, their approach was broader, aiming to include discussions on all aspects of health and wellbeing, as determined by the community.

Funded by the NIHR Manchester Clinical Research Network, their engagement team supported the outreach and will use the community's identified priorities to inform local residents about existing research studies. This ensures that research efforts are aligned with what matters most to the community.

By expanding the scope in this way, community partners who contributed to the project will be able to use the output to set strategic objectives and pursue funding opportunities for their respective organisations. The aim of the project was to contribute to the discourse on power-sharing by transitioning from collaborative design processes to shared outcomes, outputs and impact.

Why work in Gorton?

In the past, Gorton has been left out of conversations about health research:

  • Gorton is rich with community groups and organisations keen to work together
  • Gorton is the highest priority neighbourhood within Central Manchester and past engagement demonstrated a good appetite for public involvement.
  • More information about the area can be found in this neighbourhood profile.

Impact

The project will continue to work together to develop the outcomes by:

  • Sharing research priorities through the NIHR Clinical Research Network and encouraging researchers to consider community developed research questions in their future plans.
  • Shaping future community development and service delivery for Healthy Me Healthy Communities, Steering Group members and project partners.
  • Developing methods and or toolkits for further community led priority-setting activities in Greater Manchester and beyond.

The PSP was led by Healthy Me Healthy Communities (HMHC) and Vocal.

 

The images were taken at the Community Gorton PSP workshop in February 2024 by Chelsea Farrell for Gorton Health Matters.

Further information

Gorton Community PSP website

Find out more by visiting the Gorton Community PSP website

Key documents

These documents set out the aims, objectives and commitments of the PSP.

Gorton Community PSP protocol

Gorton Community PSP Steering Group terms of reference