Leicester Voices

A community-led listening project and report on understanding health priorities from communities

Who I worked with: University of Leicester

Partners: University Hospitals Leicester Trust, Citizens UK

Project Description

Funding by UKRI, I was co-investigator for a community-led listening project called Leicester Voices. The project was based on building shared knowledge in community organising and enabling community-led listening methods to gather insights on health priority areas from a range of underrepresented communities.

The project started in December 2019 and as COVID developed, the project team had to be agile in redesigning our engagement approaches. Acknowledging the importance of agility and enabling community researchers to adopt methods to suit them and their communities meant we could continue to work towards our project aims of exploring effective coproduction, community-led methods and creating a set of future priorities for research.

You can access the report on Figshare

View the Publication Here

Learnings and Insights

Institutions conducting health research and delivering services can find routes to connecting with underrepresented communities by reaching through partners and working with trusted individuals in community settings. This model of enabling community-led listening linked to setting research priorities could be strategically backed by long term PPIE strategy and research development. This would require upskilling staff and increasing capacity.