Now that you’ve been introduced to our new blog, we thought it would make sense to give you a whistle-stop tour of our DEPTH research group here at LSHTM.
We are a group of scholars in the Department of Public Health, Environments and Society at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who take an interdisciplinary approach to health. We are one of LSHTM’s newest hubs, developed earlier this year as a way to bring together some of our shared work. We use the acronym DEPTH to unify our themes of Dialogue, Evidence, Participation and Translation for Health. We conduct research into different types of dialogue and different people’s participation in health with the aim of increasing equity and improving health worldwide, and amplifying less-heard voices.
Our new website has allowed us to introduce a wider audience to our public health work – you can check it out here. We see it as a space for communication and conversation – not just with academic colleagues, but also in policy debates, in education systems and with the wider public. We also think it is important to show our work to a wide range of audiences, not just specialists, and so we have listed all of our individual or combined efforts on this page, including summaries of each research paper listed in plain English, with concepts summarised and acronyms explained. You can read about the six Research themes that underpin DEPTH here. These research themes include our work on patient and public involvement, dialogues about sexual and reproductive health and young people’s experiences of Sickle Cell, and our work with Imperial College London on the ethics of electronic health records.
As for this blog, it functions as a conversation space. It provides a way for us to write about important studies in the field of community involvement, participation and public health. We will talk about our own research, but will also write about current affairs as well as research from elsewhere, when we would like to contribute to debate. We agree that one of the most important things we can do as academics is move beyond our own research specialisms to listen to – and amplify – the perspectives of those who may be less heard. We hope you will find these perspectives as valuable as we do – and key to this is conversation.
Finally, we want to hear from you too! Our blog now has comment space, and we’re very keen to hear your views, thoughts and ideas. You can get also get involved via our Twitter account, and you can contact us with questions, feedback or even your own blog pitch. Finally, look out for upcoming events on this blog page, where we will post details of future talks, meetings and events, as well as commentaries on new publications and policy.
Thanks again for reading and we look forward to sharing more about our work at DEPTH.
Sam, Research Fellow, DEPTH.
