Reaching the hard to reach – the challenges of a community operational researcher!

Health inequalities and offending are issues that have raised considerable interest from policy makers, practitioners and the research community, as they seek to understand the causes and the potential solutions to their redress. A research ‘gap’ nevertheless exists in that whilst successive reports have identified vulnerable groups who are most likely to offend and have ‘poor’ health outcomes, there is limited ‘field’ research amongst these groups traditionally considered ‘hard to reach’. As this paper explores in 2003 the Community Operational Research Unit was invited to evaluate a Healthy Living Centre (HLC) within Lincolnshire Probation and this provided an exceptional opportunity to examine the problems through a sustained ‘engaged’ research project. What became evident as the HLC and the research emerged were the challenges and rewards of community operational research as much as the issues that were intensively explored.