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Health Inequalities and risk factors in the early years

Project reference: RAS-25-201

Approval date: 9 July 2025

Lead organisation

Principal Investigator
Scottish Government Justine Menzies

 

Lay summary

Scotland faces ongoing challenges with persisting health inequalities. These inequalities can affect many aspects of people’s lives, can occur at different stages of life and persist for many years.

There are observable inequalities very early in life and persistent risks associated with maternal risk factors in pregnancy. However, little is known about how these factors overlap and how multi-morbidity is experienced in individuals that are pregnant as well as how this impacts on health care usage. 

This PhD student internship will make use of data sets available via Research Data Scotland and use data linkage to investigate and report on outcomes of interest in the area of health inequalities, particularly for maternal and early childhood outcomes.

This will involve using a range of data sources including prescriptions and secondary care to allow for multi-morbidity to be explored.

Public benefit statement

This project seeks to better understand risk factors in pregnancy and how they are interconnected. It will use administrative data from Scotland to look at early risk factors holistically to better enable early intervention and prevention in pregnancy and pre-conception. 

This project will build on an evidence review of risks in pregnancy for early child development and will add to this document by providing data relating to the identified risks in pregnancy (where data is available in the administrative data) this linked data set will also enable co-morbidity (the co-existence of one or more health conditions or risk factors) which will add to the current literature.

The research team plan to publish a report with their interim findings towards the end of 2025.

 

Datasets used

Visit our Data Use Register to find details of other projects approved through the Researcher Access Service.

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