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VISION presenting at the Prevention Research 2026 conference

Nine VISION colleagues have had workshop, symposium and individual abstracts accepted at the upcoming Prevention Research 2026 conference in March. The Population Health Improvement UK and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, in partnership with VISION funder, the UK Prevention Research Partnership, organised the event to explore the latest research and collaborative strategies for preventing non-communicable diseases and reducing health inequalities across the UK. This year’s theme is Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice for Health Equity.

VISION research is interdisciplinary and as such, several colleagues collaborated on symposiums and the workshop. We are partnering with Groundswell, Kailo and PHI UK Population Mental Health as well as the Violence, Abuse and Mental Health Network, and High Trees Community Development Trust amongst others.

Individual presentation

Violence across the life course and physical and mental health trajectories in later life

Anastasia Fadeeva, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s University of London

Symposiums

Lessons Learned from Lived Experience Engagement in Violence and Trauma Research

Sian Oram, Professor at Kings College London and VISION Co-Investigator
Kimberly Cullen, VISION Knowledge Exchange Manager, City St George’s UoL
Alicia Stillman, Violence, Abuse and Mental Health Network at Kings College London
Polina Obolenskaya, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s UoL
Annie Bunce, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s UoL

Policy insights from a population understanding of mental health inequalities: using England’s mental health survey series, the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys (APMS)

Presenters include:

Sally McManus, Professor at City St George’s UoL and VISION Co-Deputy Director
Elizabeth Cook, Senior Lecturer at City St George’s UoL and VISION Co-Investigator

Centring the voices of young people – Learning from four participatory, place-based approaches to violence prevention

Presenters include:

Elizabeth Cook, Senior Lecturer at City St George’s UoL and VISION Co-Investigator
Ruth Weir, VISION Senior Research Fellow at City St George’s UoL

Understudied Commercial Drivers of Health: Exploring Industry Practices & Developing a Prevention Research Agenda

Presenters include Sally McManus, Professor at City St George’s UoL and VISION Co-Deputy Director

Workshop

Using Systems Approaches to Connect Communities and Tackle Complexity in Prevention

Workshop leads include Olumide Adisa, VISION Co-Investigator at City St George’s UoL

Arms industry as a commercial determinant of health

Experts are urging the medical profession to confront the global arms industry as the UK and other NATO nations dramatically increase defence spending to counter growing global aggressions, one under-recognised aspect of security debates is the role of the arms industry. And as London prepares to host the world’s largest arms fair, Defence and Security Equipment International, health professionals must do more to resist the arms industry’s influence on government agendas and its damaging effects on human and planetary health.

Looking critically across this landscape, the BMJ has produced a new series examining the role of the arms trade in health and calling for more scrutiny of its health-harming activities and its unhealthy relationship with governments.

In the series, two VISION researchers, Professor Mark Bellis of Liverpool John Moores University and Professor Gene Feder from University of Bristol, with colleagues, lay out the direct and wider harms of arms and show how weapons manufacturers use commercial strategies to subvert public health agendas and shape discourse around security and violence.

They argue that, like the tobacco, alcohol, and fossil fuel industries, the arms industry should be seen as a commercial determinant of health, where corporate practices matter as much as products when considering how industries can harm health.

These practices include marketing, lobbying, funding of think tanks and universities, and forging close relationships with governments, which the industry uses to shape public policy and regulatory environments in its favour while deflecting responsibility for its contribution to perpetuating conflict, injuries, and death.

Mark, Gene and colleagues’ analyses suggest that examining these industry dynamics can help uncover both direct and systemic health harms and inform how health considerations should feature alongside defence and profit.

They acknowledge that this is a conceptual shift but say “it is also a call to action for health professionals including researchers, policy makers, and civil society to advocate for a reorientation away from design, distribution, and deployment for profit and towards global priorities of health, human rights, and peace.”

To access the entire BMJ Series : Arms industry as a commercial determinant of health | The BMJ

To access the analyses by Mark, Gene and their colleagues:

For further information, please contact Mark at m.a.bellis@ljmu.ac.uk

Illustration from University of Bristol

Commercial determinants of violence highlighted at World Safety Conference by Prof Mark Bellis

This September, on behalf of the VISION research consortium and Liverpool John Moores University, Professor Mark Bellis gave the plenary violence prevention address to World Safety Conference in in New Delhi, India.

World Safety 2024 is the World Health Organization’s biennial global conference on injury prevention and safety promotion, covering all aspects of violence and unintentional injury.

Mark’s plenary dealt with the commercial determinants of violence based on a paper published earlier this year with his VISION colleagues, Professor Sally McManus and Dr Olumide Adisa, and others.

In his presentation, Mark outlined how, as well as governments, public sector organisations and charities, commercial organisations also have a major part to play in the prevention of violence. The plenary considered commercial influence on violence through political, scientific, marketing supply/waste chain, labour & employment financial and reputational management practices. For some industries such as the arms and alcohol industries their relationships the causes of violence are already relatively well understood. However, mining, financial, social media, clothing and other manufacturing industries are also contributors to a growing violence problem.

The plenary presentation addressed commercial impacts on child maltreatment, sexual and domestic violence, youth violence and elder abuse. It also explored how companies can, and should, move from being part of the violence problem to leaders in implementing solutions.

Companies and commercial processes shape violence

VISION seeks to highlight the wider contexts in which violence occurs. To tackle the causes of violence and improve violence reduction strategies, governments tend to look to families, communities, schools, health and justice services, and community and voluntary sector organisations for solutions. While these are crucial, a broader and more radical approach is also needed.

For decades, health researchers have raised awareness of various ‘commercial determinants of health’. Initially, this work focused on industries producing harmful products like tobacco, alcohol, fast food and fossil fuels. However, the approach has expanded to show how a much wider range of companies and industries harm our health through their various practices.

We applied an existing framework to unpack the specific ways in which companies and commercial processes might shape not only our health – but also the nature and extent of violence in societies. The analysis was carried out by Kat Ford from the Public Health Collaborating Unit at Bangor University, Karen Hughes from Policy and International Health, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Investment for Health and Wellbeing, Public Health Wales, and VISION researchers Mark Bellis, Olumide Adisa and Sally McManus.

A summary of six of the ways in which companies can fuel violence has been published in The Conversation. They include political practices like lobbying against safety legislation, and financial practices like investing in regimes with poor human rights records. The full paper details these and other commercial processes and argues that governments need to consider the role and influence of companies if violence prevention is to be effective.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash