Search Engage

We would like to start this society to bring awareness and opportunities to students by providing meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of health inequalities. Some of the benefits of our group would be through achieving the group objectives by:

Liaising with the Student Fairhealth Sheffield branch who have already created a thriving range of educational resources, events and observational opportunities for students working in healthcare.

Students will be supported in their development of content by an enthusiastic team of academics. We have already secured a link with an academic locally who would support our society (Dr Gemma Ashwell). The larger Fairhealth charity also has a number of healthcare professionals who are passionate about this cause with a range of expertise who could offer their time to discuss and aid students in developing these educational resources. 

We are also looking forward to collaborating with other local community organisations tackling health inequalities and  with established student societies to put on shared events with a focus on health equity (e.g. Abuse Awareness Society, The Right To Walk). 

We will put up a clear identity and strong social media presence via Facebook, Instagram, medical student whatsapp groups, leedsface. If we were successful in becoming a student society, we would use the annual freshers fair as a method of recruiting students from a wider range of courses. This would also ensure sustainability of involvement as students progress through their course and possibly provide more experience and knowledge for their courses.

The most similar student society is Students for Global Health Leeds. Whilst this society has similar health advocacy themes, there is a focus on global interventions, compared to Student Fairhealth which aims to affect local change. Furthermore, Student Fairhealth aims to offer a range of supplemental educational resources for students from a whole range of disciplines in order for them to apply the concept of health equity to their future careers. This would prioritise student education and interdisciplinary collaboration over an action/advocacy approach. This would be reflected in the choice of events. 

There are a range of other societies which have overlap with the proposed Student Fairhealth society These include Homed, and Student Action for Refugees. These societies have similar aims to Student Fairhealth but only focus on the most marginalised members of society. In reality, it is estimated that 33% of children in Leeds are living in relative poverty; the number of people in Leeds who have benefited from food banks has increased by nearly 50% in one year. There is a clear need to educate future healthcare professionals beyond these most extreme examples: this is an area where we believe the curriculum is lacking.