Abstract

Background: Worldwide, rural areas face specific health challenges that remained poorly addressed by current research and policies.
Aims: The aim of the LIIRH is to ‘shine a light’ on the unacceptable health inequities that exist across the rural-urban divide and to find innovative ways of reducing or ideally eliminating that inequality.
Methods: The LIIRH brings together world-leading specialists, conducting research across a range of rural health related concerns, ranging from infectious disease epidemiology, HIV, oral health, and emergent response analysis through to sustainable remote health care delivery solutions, meta-governance approaches, and m-health technological innovation. The three research key themes of the LIIRH are (i) Chronic Care, Chronic Disease, and Disadvantaged Populations, (ii) Health Metrics and Disease Modelling and (iii) Prevention, Early Detection, and Screening.
Outcomes: Within the 18 months of its launch, the LIIRH has been supported by generous grants from the Wolfson Foundation, and the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership. LIIRH teams have built partnership with many research institutions around the world such as the Heidelberg Institute for Global Health, the Washington University, La Trobe University, The African Health Research Institute or Monash University Malaysia.
Concrete recent realisations of the LIIRH teams have been to document the age shift in HIV new infections in rural South Africa which call for a change in HIV intervention targets. Related to COVID-19, we have contributed to understanding pathways to infections among Black and South Asian communities, two communities hardly hit by the pandemic, and currently investigate vaccine hesitancy among them.
Aware of the health deprivation faced by coastal communities, we currently build on several projects aiming at understanding pathways to poor health outcomes as well as two interventions aiming at addressing health inequalities in these areas.
Several members of our team have successfully partnered-up with local organisation and care providers to improve mental health through telemedicine, early identification of partner-based gender violence using pharmacist and understanding care trajectory for depression in rural communities using big data.