Log in
Dr Covey's research has focused on understanding the public perception of hazards and how this might feed through into their preferences for safety prioritisation. Her work at Durham has changed Government policies and has had significant impacts on how UK-wide investment decisions are made. It has saved the railway industry millions of pounds in unnecessary upgrade costs and placed a monetary value on the impact of air pollution on health for the first time. Her work has allowed the views of the public to be fed into decisions that could affect their own safety and has provided more accurate and robust figures for the valuation of safety.
A sustained programme of epidemiological research at St George's, spanning 20 years, has informed air pollution control policies in the UK and internationally. Time-series studies of the acute health effects of daily fluctuations in air pollutants, initially in London, were extended to Europe-wide collaborations, trans-Atlantic comparisons and studies in Asian cities. Publication bias has been explored systematically in meta-analyses of published time-series results, and the adverse effects of different particulate fractions compared in a UK setting. This evidence base has contributed substantially to the current UK Air Quality Strategy and informs ongoing debates about health impacts of shorter-lived "greenhouse" pollutants.
Impact type: Public Policy
Significance: The research provided evidence for formulation of government policies to ameliorate poor air quality, to which fine particulate matter (PM2.5), O3 and NO2 are the most important contributors; PM2.5 alone reduces average life expectancy in the UK by 6 months and costs £9bn-£20bn a year. The research has been incorporated into UK national guidance and policy-evidence documents for Defra, the Health Protection Agency, and the Environment Agencies.
Beneficiaries are the public and the environment.
Research; date; attribution: EaStCHEM research (1995-2011) (a) established reliable techniques to measure NO2 for a national protocol, and (b) quantified the impact of pollutant emissions on PM2.5 and O3 concentrations, and on hospital admissions and deaths. Heal (EaStCHEM) led the research and wrote, collaboratively in some cases, the reports and the work cited.
Reach: UK wide.
The University of Liverpool (UoL) team at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Policy Research on Social Determinants of Health (Liverpool WHO CC) has made a leading, internationally recognised contribution to addressing the adverse health consequences of household air pollution, a problem responsible for an estimated 4 million premature deaths among 2.8 billion of the world's poorest people. Impacts include (i) generating global awareness of a hitherto poorly recognised problem through defining the disease burden, (ii) leading development of new WHO Guidelines on the issue, (iii) providing key evidence for intervention and policy studies in low-income countries and (iv) helping to formulate strategy for global initiatives to address the problem.
This case study is an illustrative example of the immediate and interim impact of our research with and for the organic waste industry. Specifically, it deals with effective management of the risk to the health of workers from exposure to bioaerosols. Led by Sykes, since 2006 a portfolio of research (both publicly available academic studies and confidential industrial reports) has been developed which led the Association for Organics Recycling (AfOR) to commission a technical guidance document for the composting industry in 2012. High-risk work activities and potential for harm to workers' health were identified, and recommendations on risk reduction strategies and good practice were made which have been endorsed by the Health and Safety Executive.
[Throughout this Impact Case Study, references to the underpinning research are numbered 1 to 6; sources to corroborate the impact are numbered 7 to 16.]