The Deaf British Sign Language (BSL) using community in Wales have more challenges than hearing populations in accessing healthcare services (especially in emergency situations), health information, mental health care services and support, and family-related services and training. The Deaf in Wales also suffer from inconsistent interpreting services and poor communication in many health-care settings and, as a result, are also at greater risk of underdiagnoses and under-treatment of chronic diseases and tend to have poorer health than the general population (Sign Health, 2019; Shank & Foltz, 2019; Foltz & Shank, 2020; Foltz et al., 2022). Deaf people also have an incidence of mental health problems that is twice as high as the general population and face barriers accessing support services (Terry et al., 2021). Research has shown that access to nature and outdoor activities is a health asset (Houlden et al. 2018; Rebar et al. 2015); however, many of Wales's cultural and natural assets are not accessible because materials are rarely available in BSL. The goal of this project is to design, implement and evaluate Deaf-community-lead solutions for these known and documented health inequities and inequalities. We are a transdisciplinary team of academic and non-academic, hearing, and Deaf partners. Our project will use innovative social networking techniques, community outreach, focus groups, interviews, and custom video-based questionnaires and app technologies to identify sustainable, community-led, culturally, and linguistically driven solutions to improve the health and wellbeing of this community. We will then develop, implement, and evaluate these solutions in five areas that impact Deaf Welsh citizens' health and wellbeing. These areas are: (1) public health, (2) mental health, (3) interpreting services, (4) access to natural resources, parks, and use of natural environment resources and (5) language and communication. In the areas of (1) public health, (2) mental health, and (3) interpreting services we will work with the Deaf community as well as the NHS, Health Boards, interpreters, and other service providers to develop culturally and linguistically driven proposals to improve services at every stage of the healthcare delivery process. Solutions will focus on access to interpreters and BSL language services and improving d/Deaf awareness with respect to language and culture and d/Deaf rights with respect to the law. In the area of (4) natural resources, we will develop BSL video guide apps for better accessibility to Welsh natural resources, parks, and heritage sites at three locations across Wales. In the area of (5) language and communication, the Welsh dialect of BSL, it's lexicon and regional variations, remains undocumented and undescribed. This project will develop an on-line dictionary and corpus resources, with a particular focus on medical terminology, to aid interpreters and service providers in Wales. We will assess the potential positive impact of the resources that we are developing as part of this project and use the results obtained from this project to inform and influence current local and national health care policy, services, practices, and delivery to aid compliance with the 2010 Equality and 2015 Well-being of Future generations Acts.

We propose a new phase of the successful Mathematics for Real-World Systems (MathSys) Centre for Doctoral Training that will address the call priority area "Mathematical and Computational Modelling". Advanced quantitative skills and applied mathematical modelling are critical to address the contemporary challenges arising from biomedicine and health sectors, modern industry and the digital economy. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills as well as Tech City UK have identified that a skills shortage in this domain is one of the key challenges facing the UK technology sector: there is a severe lack of trained researchers with the technical skills and, importantly, the ability to translate these skills into effective solutions in collaboration with end-users. Our proposal addresses this need with a cross-disciplinary, cohort-based training programme that will equip the next generation of researchers with cutting-edge methodological toolkits and the experience of external end-user engagement to address a broad variety of real-world problems in fields ranging from mathematical biology to the high-tech sector. Our MSc training (and continued PhD development) will deliver a core of mathematical techniques relevant to all applied modelling, but will also focus on two cross-cutting methodological themes which we consider key to complex multi-scale systems prediction: modelling across spatial and temporal scales; and hybrid modelling integrating complex data and mechanistic models. These themes pervade many areas of active research and will shape mathematical and computational modelling for the coming decades. A core element of the CDT will be productive and impactful engagement with end-users throughout the teaching and research phases. This has been a distinguishing feature of the MathSys CDT and is further expanded in our new proposal. MSc Research Study Groups provide an ideal opportunity for MSc students to experience working in a collaborative environment and for our end-users to become actively involved. All PhD projects are expected to be co-supervised by an external partner, bringing knowledge, data and experience to the modelling of real-world problems; students will normally be expected to spend 2-4 weeks (or longer) with these end-users to better understand the case-specific challenges and motivate their research. The potential renewal of the MathSys CDT has provided us with the opportunity to expand our portfolio of external partners focusing on research challenges in four application areas: Quantitative biomedical research, (A2) Mathematical epidemiology, (A3) Socio-technical systems and (A4) Advanced modelling and optimization of industrial processes. We will retain the one-year MSc followed by three-year PhD format that has been successfully refined through staff experience and student feedback over more than a decade of previous Warwick doctoral training centres. However, both the training and research components of the programme will be thoroughly updated to reflect the evolving technical landscape of applied research and the changing priorities of end-users. At the same time, we have retained the flexibility that allows co-creation of activities with our end-users and allows us to respond to changes in the national and international research environments on an ongoing yearly basis. Students will share a dedicated space, with a lecture theatre and common area based in one of the UK's leading mathematical departments. The space is physically connected to the new Mathematical Sciences building, at the interface of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, and provides a unique location for our interdisciplinary activities.