Health and wellbeing

The humanities and social sciences offer vital insights into understanding the health challenges facing society today. The Academy is working to explore how the humanities and social sciences can inform, improve and reframe health policy discussions.

In March 2021, on the first anniversary of the UK going into lockdown, the Academy published two reports addressing the long-term societal impacts of COVID-19. The COVID Decade, outlines evidence across a range of policy areas, building upon a series of expert reviews, engagement, synthesis and analysis across the humanities and social science research community. It is accompanied by a separate report, Shaping the COVID Decade, which considers how policymakers might respond to these challenges. Health and wellbeing was a prominent theme across this work, which included in-depth consideration of physical and mental health (including young people and at work), wellbeing and the environment we live in.

Since the publication of this work, the Academy has received a request from SAGE to investigate the geographical factors associated with historically poorer public health outcomes over the past 200 years. The Academy is working in co-operation with the Academy of Medical Sciences to independently investigate this topic and convene a roundtable of experts from a range of disciplines.

A major strand of the Academy's current health policy work is a series of workshops, held in collaboration with Wellcome, exploring the future relationship between health policy topics and research in the humanities and social sciences. Further information on this workshop series, and on other aspects of the Academy's health policy work, can be explored using the links below.