Wave 1 Community Innovation Teams: Interim Impact Summary (November 2025)
ReCITE’s Wave 1 Community Innovation Teams (CITs) are demonstrating how community-led, creative approaches can address persistent health inequalities across Liverpool and Knowsley. Funded by UKRI and AHRC, ReCITE brings together communities, healthcare providers, creatives and local authorities to co-design solutions to pressing health challenges.
Five Community Innovation Teams focused on lung cancer screening, childhood and maternal vaccination, and antimicrobial resistance. Each team used local data, lived experience and storytelling to design interventions that build trust, tackle fear and improve access to care.
Key highlights include:
-
1,610 additional people identified and invited for lung cancer screening through improved GP smoking-status records, with the potential for earlier detection of up to 15 cancers.
-
Over 6,000 community conversations about health, delivered by trusted local voices in neighbourhoods, schools, clinics and community spaces.
-
Creative campaigns such as Lungevity (Anfield & Everton) and Every Breath Matters (Kirkby) used humour, music and storytelling to reframe lung cancer screening and reduce fear and stigma.
-
A multilingual whooping cough vaccination toolkit co-created with women with lived experience of the asylum system, now embedded in Liverpool Women’s Hospital maternity pathways.
-
A peer-led antimicrobial resistance campaign trained asylum seekers as community champions, reaching hundreds of people with culturally relevant health education.
-
The Healthy Hero Academy in Knowsley engaged children, schools and parents in conversations about immunisation, supporting confidence and understanding around MMR vaccination.
Across all projects, CITs showed that equity by design, creativity and genuine power-sharing can lead to measurable system improvements, stronger partnerships and more inclusive health services. Formal evaluations with the University of Liverpool and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are underway, with results expected in 2026.
|
ReCITE is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation. |
 |
Join our LinkedIn community.