S10E4: Engaging children and communities for lung health - An octopus of methods!

Connecting Citizens to Science

In this week's episode, we are talking to the Tupumue Project, who applied creative participatory methods alongside clinical data to understand how many children, in two communities in Nairobi, Kenya have lung problems, and to explore children's experiences of lung problems and air pollution. The project used a variety of creative research methods including drawings, drama, walking interviews with go pros, comics, graffiti and others. They even engaged children in co- analysis and theme development.

Co-host for this episode, Dr. Hellen Meme, told us more about the programme;

“The choice of the word “Tupumue” (meaning “lets breathe”!) as an identity of the program was because breathing is a function important to all. The Tupumue programme was a complex undertaking considering the broadness of the subject that was covered, in regard to establishing the burden of non-communicable lung diseases in school children and risk factors in both an informal and formal community context. The necessary skill pool had to be wide to achieve this and hence the broad collaboration involving a multidisciplinary team derived from several North and South institutions. For everyone to own the study, we held consultative meetings through which we established a niche for everyone to participate. We are in the process of widely disseminating our study findings and are currently sharing our results with all stakeholders including participating schools and the community in order to get their views on the findings before we engage policy makers”.

This episode features:

Dr. Hellen Meme (co-host) - Chief Research Scientist, Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)

Hellen Meme’s research work spans over 30 years and involves health and communities. Her research area of interest is in respiratory diseases with bias towards conducting research in congregate communities. This necessitates a broad skill base as well as innovation in planning approaches appropriate for project implementation. In this regard, engagement of community and other stakeholders is key.

Dr Sarah West - Centre Director and Senior Research Fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York

Sarah has been using citizen science approaches since she began work at SEI York in 2008, working on topics ranging from air pollution and biodiversity through to parenting and food waste. All her work uses citizen science approaches to engage a diverse range of people with research. She uses this approach because she believes that well designed projects can have huge benefits for advancing research and for making a difference for all those involved in projects. She also conducts research around the method of citizen science, looking at who is and isn’t participating in projects, and evaluating projects’ efficacy.

Relevant links:

https://www.sei.org/featured/citizen-science-month/

Fred Orina - Senior Research Scientist, Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)

Fred’s interest is research implementation. He has 10 years’ experience in coordinating the implementation of human health research, with a focus on lung health studies in both static and nomadic communities. This involves liaising with communities and diverse stakeholders. With a scientific background, he acts as the interlink between the community, researchers, and the sponsor.

Professor Graham Devereux - Professor of Respiratory Medicine, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Graham is a Professor of Respiratory Medicine with research interests in the antenatal influences on the life course of airways disease and clinical trials in COPD. He is also an Honorary Consultant at Aintree University Hospital and spent 2020-2022 managing patients with COVID-19.

His research into the life-course of airways diseases such as asthma and COPD has involved studies of large numbers of pregnant women, children and adults, originally in the UK, since his move to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine his work has involved large numbers of children and adults in Kenya and Malawi.

Follow Connecting Citizens to Science on your usual podcast platform or YouTube to hear more about the methods and approaches that researchers apply to connect with communities and co-produce solutions to global health challenges. The series covers wide ranging topics such as TB, NTD’s, antenatal and postnatal care, mental wellbeing and climate change, all linked to health.  

If you would like your own project or programme to feature in an episode, get in touch with producers of Connecting Citizens to Science, the SCL Agency.