Health Ageing in Bristol: Co-designing health interventions with older adults

• February 2026
• Blogs

Next up in our legacy series: Healthy Ageing in Bristol

In 2024, we learned about a cohort of the population aged 50-70, with two or fewer long-term health conditions (e.g. COPD, diabetes),  and/or low-level mental health conditions (depression/anxiety) that had an average non-elective spend that was considerably higher than average within the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Integrated Care Board (ICB) area for residents in this age group.

We wanted to understand what was driving this and whether or not co-producing community-based solutions could turn this trend around, by better supporting residents and meeting their needs in a preventative and holistic way  

THE ASK:

There were many  questions to our work, some methodological and some solutions focused.  We wanted to understand the value of the co-designed approach, as well as what exploring what co-designed solutions could be applied to these important questions. 

We asked ourselves: 

• Can we prevent the predicted steep decline in health with people already facing health inequalities, by focusing on and developing community based interventions? 
• What would happen if the residents were involved in co-designing some of the solutions?
• How can organisations like the VCS and NHS support them effectively and in a sustained way? 

OUR APPROACH:

We worked over a 9 month period, in partnership with University of West of England, Bristol Locality Partnership, VCS organisation and residents. 

We applied a mixed methods approach to the work, using community based, participatory techniques, to get to the heart of residents’ needs and ideas. We engaged residents throughout the process, including some as peer researchers, to help test out some of the intervention ideas.  We continuously fed this back to project partners and iterated the work as we went along.

KEY LEARNINGS

The insights from this work highlighted that there were opportunities and appetite for putting different interventions in place to help the residents manage their health and well-being in a more sustainable and preventative way.  

Interestingly there are a wider variety of community activities already being run by the VCS organisations. Some of the initiatives that residents designed are already in place, they just didn’t know about them, or feel comfortable accessing them. 

Therefore, there are jobs to do in filling the information gap around community activities through a more joined up approach and sharing information in everyday places and spaces.

The ideas for warm welcome sessions for new or hesitant members of the community would be beneficial in bringing new people in, telling them about the range of support on offer and help them to address some of their health inequalities. 

Many residents wanted to get together with others around food and skills sharing. Their ask wasn’t complicated, getting them to find out about opportunities and taking them up was the challenge.

IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE

Please contact Marnie (marnie@neighbourlylab.com) to discuss how working with residents in participatory ways can have widespread benefits for service delivery and uptake