Dr Cristina Santos

This new project is supported by the ESRC under the GCRF Inclusive Societies initiative. It aims to demonstrate the benefits for inclusive development of linking local industrial and social innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It will do this by addressing the “hard case” of increasing access to cancer care in East Africa.

We will establish the first consortium to focus systematically on building evidence and community practice to tackle comorbidity between mental illness and other long-term conditions (LTCs) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Such comorbidity is increasing rapidly and presents a major challenge to SSA health care provision. Community-based interventions appear to be an efficacious response to this problem. However evidence to support this is still weak, especially in SSA. This proposal builds on our existing collaborations which have begun to examine the scope for inclusive and affordable community practice to tackle such comorbidities (Lloyd et al., 2015; Meddenhall et al., 2017). This proposal will build a sustainable research network of African and UK researchers to: 1. Generate a greater shared understanding of existing research on the interrelationships between mental health and other LTCs and the role of community engagement in SSA in tackling the challenge; 2. Identify gaps in current research and practice in different SSA countries from a range of disciplinary perspectives and experience; 3. Develop methodologies for combining research and practice to create and evaluate partnerships with communities for problem identification, decision-making and shared actions for prevention, treatment and management of comorbid mental and physical LTCs; 4. Develop and submit research proposals based on these methodologies; 5. Support the development and training of novice/early career researchers from SSA; 6. Create low cost-effective networking among a new strong and sustainable African network with UK partners for a long term impact in health research.