IEU Seminar: Vittal Katikireddi

Title: Developing evidence to address the economic determinants of health inequalities: Attempting to move from description to a policy response
Abstract: The economic determinants of health are potentially of fundamental importance for population health and health inequalities. At the individual level, experiences of poverty, unemployment and financial insecurity have all been linked to poor health. For populations, experiencing recession and cost-of living challenges, as well as government responses to such macroeconomic crises, also appear to have substantial health consequences. Indeed, austerity policies have been suggested as an important contribution to the stalling life expectancy experienced by the UK over the last decade. Economic and social security policies can therefore play a fundamental role in improving population health and reducing health inequalities.
While government policies to address health inequalities will likely require engaging with the economic determinants of health, developing an appropriate evidence base can be challenging. This talk will provide a summary of ongoing areas of research on the economic determinants of health inequalities by focusing on three areas: understanding the economic determinants of health (including from a causal perspective), evaluating the impacts of government policies, and harnessing the evidence to inform decision-making through policy microsimulation models.
To illustrate our team’s approach to developing causal understanding, findings from a range of studies will be presented, including the effects of income on health outcomes (triangulating across marginal structural models, fixed-effects analyses and Mendelian randomisation) and a ‘causal systematic review’ to assess whether income inequality has an additional effect (than individual socioeconomic circumstances) on population health. Natural policy experiment studies, such as an ongoing NIHR-funded evaluation of the mental health impacts of Universal Credit, will be presented. Microsimulation modelling can be considered a method of integrating existing evidence and its use to explore potential consequences of economic policies will be illustrated using the example of Universal Basic Income
Biography: Vittal Katikireddi is Professor of Public Health & Health Inequalities and an honorary Consultant in Public Health at Public Health Scotland. His chief research interests are in improving the development and application of evidence to inform healthy public policy. He is a mixed-method researcher, having completed his PhD studying the relationship between evidence and public health policy using qualitative interviews and discourse analysis, with his research now being primarily quantitative. He conducts analyses of cross-sectoral linked administrative records (e.g. using register data within Brazil, Sweden and the UK) and of longitudinal survey data to understand the social determinants of health. Much of his research is policy-focused, including evaluating the health impacts of natural policy experiments (e.g. minimum unit pricing of alcohol) and using microsimulation to explore the impacts of potential future policies.
Vittal has published over 300 research outputs, is a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has served as a member of the ‘Health of the Public in 2040’ working group for the Academy of Medical Sciences, the UK Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) and its subgroup on ethnicity, and co-chaired the Scottish Government’s Expert Reference Group on Ethnicity and COVID-19. He has sat on numerous funding panels for NIHR (e.g. Public Health Research programme) and currently serves on the MRC/NIHR Better Methods, Better Research panel and the MRC Population Health & Systems Medicine Board. He is on the International Advisory Board for The Lancet Public Health.