Pandemics, vulnerability, and prevention: time to fundamentally reassess how we value and communicate risk?

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ABSTRACT

For over a decade, pandemics have been on the UK National Risk Register as both the likeliest and most severe of threats. Non-infectious ‘lifestyle’ diseases were already crippling our healthcare services and our economy. COVID-19 has exposed two critical vulnerabilities: firstly, the UK’s failure to adequately assess and communicate the severity of non-communicable disease; secondly, the health inequalities across our society, due not least to the poor quality of our urban environments. This suggests a potentially disastrous lack of preventative action and risk management more generally, notably with regards to the existential risks from the climate and ecological crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-communicable disease
• cities
• inequality
• vulnerability
• risk
• priorities

Additional information

Funding

The TRUUD Consortium has been funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP), which is made up of the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Health and Social Care Research and Development Division (Welsh Government), Medical Research Council, National Institute for Health Research, Natural Environment Research Council, Public Health Agency (Northern Ireland), The Health Foundation and the Wellcome Trust; UK Prevention Research Partnership [MR/S037586/1].

Notes on contributors

Daniel Black

The authors are all part of the TRUUD Consortium (‘Tackling the Root causes Upstream of Unhealthy urban Development’). TRUUD is a five-year research program that started in October 2019, involves 42 researchers across five universities, two city and city region partners, and will be engaging with hundreds of practitioner advisors and participants. The academic disciplines include: public health, urban planning and design, policy studies, corporate governance and organisation studies, public health and corporate law, environmental and health economics, systems engineering, and public engagement. TRUUD aims to develop and test a replicable framework model for intervention across multiple leverage points in two major UK cities using economic valuation and the creative arts alongside a major program of stakeholder, decision-maker and public engagement.