Round 'Ere

What makes you well? We’re looking for paid community researchers in Widnes.

The support we’re provided by the NHS, Councils and other community organisations is designed using information they hold about us. But are they using the right information to understand what we need and make good decisions?

How do they know we’re well?

Generally, it’s made up of things like: smoking rates, how physically fit people are, whether people are out of work due to illness. and even how long people live. Organisations around us collect all this information to guide how they invest in and design local services and support.

Now those factors that determine whether you’re ‘well’ come from lots of very analytical people, people all over the world who work in research, medicine, social sciences – people who’ve pulled together information over decades and decided ‘this is what it means to be well’. That feels a bit odd though, doesn’t it?

Yes, they’re experts in their fields, but they aren’t living your life, and they don’t know what it feels like to be you. At the Civic Data Cooperative we’re really intrigued about how we can change this, how we can take a bigger focus on what you think matters, so we’ve decided to run a test project to help get this data back under your control.

What we plan to do

Over coming months we’ll be looking for people to do some bits of work for us, those who get involved will be paid or given vouchers in exchange for the time, so no one will be out of pocket.

We’ll be asking you to go out and talk to the people around you, helping us to find out what ‘feeling well’ means to them. Let’s be clear from the outset, that question has no right or wrong answers – we want to know what makes you feel good and happy, what makes your life feel like it’s going well.

It might mean:

  • you get to go to the pub a few times a week and chat to your friends,
  • have a day out with the kids,
  • spend some time supporting someone else with their struggles or
  • getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep once in a while.

Once we know what this looks like we’ll then go away and start to think about what information is already available in our systems. This’ll help us to uncover whether we currently measure the right things around what makes you feel well.

If those two things don’t match up, then the next step is to work with you to think about how we might start measuring such things on a really local level. How we can start asking better questions and how we can go on to use this information in a better way – using it to design support, products and services that actually impact those measures that you have told us are important.

This approach is a really different one, it’s all about putting you in charge of the information organisations collect about you. We want you to be able to guide the stuff that they see as important when designing local services.

We’re ready to hear your ideas on what makes you well, after all its your life and your wellness and the most important viewpoint on it, is yours.

Want to find out more?

Over coming months we’ll be looking for people to lead our community work. We want to recruit a small team of Community Researchers and we’re wondering if one of those people might be you? If you’re interested in getting involved, we don’t expect you to do it for free, we’ll pay you for your time and provide training and equipment to help with this work.

We’ll need you to go out and talk to the people around you, helping us to find out what ‘feeling well’ means to them. Let’s be clear from the outset, that question has no right or wrong answers – we want to know what makes you feel good and happy.

Register your interest in becoming a Community Researcher by filling in this short form. If you have any questions or want to find out more, please text or call us on 07883 724 273

Click here for more information or to register your interest

This project has been approved by the University of Liverpool Research Ethics Committee, reference number 12124.