In an unexpected moment of serendipity at this year’s Silmo Academy event, I heard about the Born in Bradford NHS project for the first time.
Apart from directing one of my favourite films as a teenager, the heartfelt but sadly dated P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, filmmaker Michael Apted is probably best remembered for Seven Up, his long-running series of documentaries that began in 1964. The then novel idea was to follow in real-time a selection of seven-year-old children as they went through life. Along the way, there were interviews with all of the participants about their experiences of matters as profound as love, money, race and opportunity. It offers a window into the lives of people from a range of backgrounds as they grew up in the UK and is set to continue in 2026, at which point the subjects will be in their 70s.
The Born in Bradford project reminded me of this. Using the city’s multi-ethnic and economically divergent population as test subjects, the project is an internationally-recognised research programme, which aims to find out what keeps families healthy and happy. All information obtained is used to assist local authority, health, education and voluntary sector providers across Bradford district ‘to develop, implement and evaluate ambitious programmes to improve population health.’
Of particular interest to us is the links with the optometry department at the University of Bradford, and data from some of the studies is likely to be important in developing our understanding of the expression of refractive errors in modern communities.
Finally, I confess this week to being part of a militant, direct action, lobbying group whose sights are set on challenging the government and its latest policies on the economy and the environment. I have been a member of the RSPB for 20 years now.
- Do you have an idea for a clinical feature? Email the clinical editor bill.harvey@markallengroup.com.
- For details of how to submit a case study and earn an interactive CPD point for each of the domains, go to the CPD area of opticianonline.net.