Communities: A strong sense of community is a major factor in overcoming the ill-effects of poverty, it was reported yesterday.
Dr Richard Mitchell and his team from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sheffield set out to find areas in Britain in which the usual relationship between poverty and poor health was different.
Their findings are to be published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The team identified 54 parliamentary constituencies which had experienced massive economic decline over a 30-year period.
From this pool they were able to identify 18 areas in which mortality rates were 10-20 per cent lower than in other equally poor areas.
Dr Mitchell's team called these areas "resilient". It then visited the localities and interviewed people to determine how they survived in the face of economic adversity.
"A key factor is that these areas have held on to their populations. Not as many folk have moved away," Dr Mitchell said. He explained that keeping a community together was helped by innovative housing policies which maintained local neighbourhoods and by having a "strong and cohesive" community identity - either by virtue of ethnicity or shared experiences.
"As soon as neighbourhoods start to decline, the people who can will leave," Dr Mitchell said.
As a result, those who stayed became less healthy. This might be due to poverty - the consequences of which could be damp housing or a lack of social support networks.
According to Dr Mitchell's figures, areas of Birmingham showed the greatest resilience, whereas the team was unable to identify any resilient areas in Scotland.
"It may be that the weight of poverty in areas of Scotland is just too great to see these effects," Dr Mitchell said.
Although doing better than expected, given their economic circumstances, the resilient communities still had mortality rates some 30 per cent higher than the British average.
However,Dr Mitchell cautioned that resilience "did not completely negate the effects of poverty".
He said that the best way to ensure health for the population was to prevent economic decline in the first place.