The health action group is made up of academics from QCAP, MDA and residents from the community. The group’s work is informed by information gathered from community led surveys, data from open-source government platforms, and QCAP’s three-year longitudinal project Growing up in the Market, which interviews children, young people and their families.

The group meets once a month to develop and implement a health strategy for the Market community. The first meeting of the year took place in the St Malachy’s Youth Centre on Monday 16 January and proved to be an extremely beneficial discussion and a springboard moving forward. Among the ideas the group discussed were walking groups to promote physical activity and social connections, as well as a series of evenings building on the naloxone training in December 2022 to talk about preventing substance use in the community. Priorities will be agreed by the action group at the next meeting, but issues discussed included setting up a workshop evening in February in the community around drug awareness. Feedback from participants was excellent:

 

"Made good progress and feeling positive about potential impacts”.

"Well facilitated meeting with actionable outcomes"

"I Felt very fulfilled, things are moving at a great pace, very satisfied."

“Great event with health group discussing health strategy for moving forward”