Impera

• Partner:  Impera Analytics Ltd
• Amount: £200,000
• Programme: multiple long-term conditions 

What we’re doing together

At Impact on Urban Health, we believe that good data is key to making a positive impact on the health of people living in cities.

We have previously worked with the Social Progress Imperative who were instrumental in developing our Urban Health Index. This Index brings together a set of metrics that helps us to understand the social and environmental factors that shape health in Lambeth and Southwark. A version Index was also expanded to cover northwest London boroughs in 2022.

Impera is a new venture born out of the Social Progress Imperative. Their mission is to bring together data and insight to help policy makers make more informed decisions. By combining useful data from both the local government and health sectors into a single placed-based view, the aim is to enable policy makers to make more informed decisions to improve health and reduce inequalities. For example, their Utility Data Aggregator provides a practical solution to help organisations accurately measure their carbon emissions and take meaningful actions to reduce them, aligning with global sustainability goals.

Impera have also established a Citizen-led Impact model, which trains and supports local researchers to study the factors that affect health in their community. Their goal is to integrate the qualitative research gathered by these community researchers with the quantitative data to inform the policies, planning, and investments that support better health and quality of life.

We are investing in Impera to support them to expand the reach of their Social Progress Index, generating insights from 294 local government areas across England. Impact on Urban Health have joined Impera’s Board of Directors and will maintain a position in the company for the foreseeable future, ensuring Impera’s continued focus on understanding and improving health across the country.

Aims of the partnership

Together we hope to further expand our collective research, data, and insight into the factors that affect our health and quality of life in London and beyond. Our aim is to provide central government, local government, integrated care systems and the social impact investment sector with detailed, community centred data that supports effective policies to improve health and reduce inequalities.

Connection to our strategy

We recognise that everyone working on services and investments to support better health need high quality data to inform strategies and measure impact and progress. Impera’s mission and approach are closely aligned with our strategic aim to improve health and reduce inequalities in cities through projects that centre the concerns of the local community. We agree that a community led research approach helps to ensure that the data gathered is truly representative of local people and supports the development of policies tailored to their concerns.

This investment in Impera’s products aims to make social data more accessible, making it easier to understand and analyse, and as a lower cost product, ensuring that a wider range of organisations can use it. Impera’s work will widen the availability of good data on social determinants of health, supporting the development of better services and strategies through an evidence-based approach.