It’s been a busy, but exciting month for the RSPH Campaigns and Policy team and hopefully you’ll have seen the recent launch of our #LidOnLoots campaign. The campaign is a result of months of planning, focus group sessions and collaboration across the 50 organisations that make up the RSPH-led Gambling Health Alliance. Collectively, we are calling for paid-for loot boxes in video games to be classed as a form of gambling and removed from games played by under 18s. As well as getting support from gambling health charities and organisations, young people who play video games also back our recommendations. Our recent survey of young gamers revealed that three-quarters of them support our call for loot boxes to be illegal for under 18s to purchase. The campaign couldn’t be more timely, as it’s been launched amid a Government consultation on loot boxes in video games, ahead of a much-needed review of the 2005 Gambling Act.  

What do we have coming up?

We have a couple of reports which are due for publication. Disparity Begins at Home is an upcoming report on the impact that working from home has had on the public’s health and wellbeing. For the majority of 2020, millions of people have left the office behind and worked from a lounge, sofa or home office instead. Our report looks at how homeworking setups have affected the public’s health and wellbeing and what employers can do to support homeworkers in the future.

Our Community Spirit project, which looks at how Covid-19 and lockdown has affected our collective community spirit, will also be released soon. Look out for a policy paper with an accompanying framework to help community groups and organisations understand how to measure Community Spirit in their local area.

In other behind the scenes news, our report on the role that faith plays in the public’s wellbeing is taking shape. As part of this project, we surveyed over 9,000 individuals from different religious groups to find out more about how faith affects their health. The feedback we had was really interesting and will help guide further research into a new area of public health policy for RSPH.

Winter isn’t just coming – it’s here. For millions of people (the Public Health England target this year is 30 million) this is the time when they’ll be eligible for the free winter flu vaccine. However, in certain areas of the UK, flu vaccine uptake is much lower than others. One of these areas is the capital, and our upcoming investigation into London's low flu vaccine uptake, and the reasons behind the lower number of vaccinations, is going to be published in the coming months.

Projects to look out for

You may remember our Health on the High Street campaign which we launched in 2015. This was an in-depth look into how local environments, including our high streets, shape people’s health and wellbeing. We’re putting what we learnt from our campaign into practice with a project we are undertaking with Walsall Council, to support on ways in which to make their high streets and town centre healthier.

 And finally, a new project on expanding public health placements for students training in the Allied Health Professions (AHPs) has just kicked off. To learn more about what an effective placement could look like and how best to match up students with placements, we are holding a series of focus groups. These have a mixture of AHP students, Programme leads in Higher Education Institutions, Placement co-ordinators, Clinical teams and Voluntary and Community Sector organisations involved.