Thursday 9th October 2025, 13:00 – 14:00 BST
Presenters: Hardeep Aiden, Research Manager, the Health Foundation and Joshua Butt, Principal Consultant, Cordis Bright
Webinar Overview:
The Health Foundation and Local Government Association (LGA) funded and oversaw the Shaping Places for Healthier Lives (England) programme between 2021 and 2024. It was an ambitious and novel approach to funding five local authority led projects to work with partners from their local area to improve health and address health inequalities.
The programme was focused on encouraging local areas to take a complex systems approach to tackling the wider determinants of poor health, based on a topic of their own choosing. These included food security, mental health, and fear of violence and crime in their communities. Each local authority – Doncaster, Newham, Northumberland, Shropshire, and Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire – determined their own direction to develop and implement a complex system change approach that fitted their local context and system of concern.
Cordis Bright and PPL were the research and learning partners for this programme, responsible for taking a developmental evaluation approach designed to engage with the changing programme of work and to provide regular learning back to the participants and to the Health Foundation and LGA. You can read the full evaluation here.
This webinar will be delivered by the Health Foundation and Cordis Bright, and will discuss:
- Commissioning complex system change approaches and developmental evaluations
- Learning from the five sites and their different approaches to using a complex system change approach
- Challenges and lessons for researchers and evaluators about how a developmental evaluation approach worked in practice.
This session will be suitable for anyone interested in the practical lessons gained from the experience of commissioning, implementing and evaluating a national complex system change programme, with an emphasis on developmental evaluation.
Presenter Biographies:
Hardeep Aiden, Research Manager, the Health Foundation
Hardeep joined the Health Foundation in 2019, primarily to manage the Foundation’s research on health inequalities and the wider determinants of health. He has led four major research programmes in that time (most recently the Emotional Support for Young People research programme) as well as numerous research and evaluation projects. He has also been heavily involved in the Foundation’s EDI and public involvement work, most notably through the development of the inclusion panel. Hardeep commissioned and oversaw the developmental evaluation of the Shaping Places for Healthier Lives (England) programme.
Joshua Butt, Principal Consultant, Cordis Bright
Since joining Cordis Bright in 2016, Joshua has worked with clients across health and social care, to evaluate a wide variety of services and interventions, with a particular focus on approaches designed to improve the performance of health and care systems, and promote more integrated ways of working. Joshua led the evaluation and learning work for the Shaping Places for Healthier Lives (England) programme, and is currently advising Public Health Wales on evaluation and complex systems for the Welsh sister programme – Shaping Places for Wellbeing Wales. You can read more about Cordis Bright’s work here.
How to Join:
This talk will take place via a Zoom Webinar – please click here to register for a place.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.