The research, published in Frontiers in Public Health, is described as the first qualitative study of its kind conducted in Lagos, Nigeria’s sprawling commercial megacity. Researchers from the University of York’s Department of Health Sciences interviewed eight faith leaders drawn from six different religious traditions, asking them how they understood hypertension and whether the networks that gather around places of worship could play a meaningful role in tackling it. The choice of method matters. Rather than measuring outcomes or testing an intervention, the team set out to map the perspectives, motivations and reservations of the people who would have to make any faith-based health partnership work on the ground. What emerged from those conversations was neither simple enthusiasm nor reflexive resistance, but something far more nuanced: a group of community leaders with a strikingly sophisticated grasp of why their congregants fall ill in the first place.

Perhaps the most striking finding is that the faith leaders interviewed did not frame high blood pressure purely as a spiritual matter, a framing that outside observers might have expected and that has often been used to justify excluding religious actors from formal health planning. Instead, they offered what the researchers characterize as a sharp critique of the structural conditions that drive cardiovascular disease in their communities. They pointed directly to poverty, to the chronic stress of daily survival in a demanding urban environment, to inadequate public infrastructure, and to systemic failures of governance that leave ordinary people without reliable access to care. In other words, these leaders were already diagnosing the social determinants of health with a precision that mirrored the language of public health scholarship, even if they had never been invited into the rooms where policy is made.

Dr Abayomi Sanusi, the study’s lead author from the University of York’s Department of Health Sciences, said the findings build on earlier work suggesting that promoting health through faith institutions holds unrealized potential to support and supplement healthcare systems. According to Sanusi, the interviews revealed that rather than viewing cardiovascular issues purely through a spiritual lens, faith leaders offer a pointed analysis of current health system deficiencies. He also noted that the leaders expressed a strong willingness to open their doors to routine screening, health education and medical referral programmes. That willingness is significant because it inverts a common assumption: the barrier to faith-based health collaboration, the study suggests, may lie less with religious communities than with the health sector’s own habits of engagement.

That caveat emerged clearly in the leaders’ accounts of past experience. While many had participated in health initiatives run by researchers, government agencies or non-governmental organizations, they consistently described those collaborations as one-sided. Initiatives, they reported, often acted in an extractive manner, taking access, trust and resources from local congregations without leaving behind sustainable health infrastructure or giving anything back to the communities that had been served. A screening drive might arrive, collect data, photograph its activities and depart, leaving no equipment, no follow-up pathway and no lasting capacity within the congregation that had hosted it. From the leaders’ perspective, their institutions were being used as conduits rather than partners, and the goodwill that made each successive campaign possible was being spent faster than it could be replenished.

Professor Su Golder, also of the University of York’s Department of Health Sciences, framed the problem in structural terms. It is evident, she said, that faith leaders are already acting as sophisticated diagnosticians of health system failure, yet they remain structurally excluded from official state and national hypertension strategies. She attributed that exclusion to a failure to recognize religious authority as a legitimate public health asset. The observation cuts to the heart of a long-standing tension in global health: institutions that can mobilize millions of people, that enjoy deep reservoirs of community trust and that possess physical infrastructure in nearly every neighbourhood are routinely left out of national non-communicable disease planning, which tends to flow exclusively through clinics, hospitals and formal government channels.

The stakes of that exclusion are considerable. Hypertension is often called a silent condition because it can progress for years without symptoms, damaging blood vessels and organs while the person affected feels perfectly well. Detecting it requires little more than a blood pressure cuff, a trained hand and a few minutes of time, which makes screening one of the most scalable interventions in all of medicine. The difficulty lies in creating regular, repeated, trusted opportunities for that simple act to happen, particularly among adults who may work long hours, live far from clinics, distrust formal institutions or simply never think to get checked. Places of worship, by contrast, are visited weekly or more often by enormous cross-sections of the adult population, including older people and those least likely to present at a clinic, making them theoretically ideal venues for sustained screening and education programmes.

The York team is careful, however, to argue that simply parachuting health campaigns into religious venues would repeat the mistakes of the past. To effectively curb hypertension in Lagos, the study concludes that health authorities must move beyond treating faith institutions as convenient access points to the community. Instead, the researchers call for genuine, reciprocal partnerships that treat religious figures as equal stakeholders, with a real voice in design, implementation and evaluation. The study sets out practical implications for researchers, practitioners, funders and government officials: health interventions should be co-designed with faith networks from the outset, and models of care should be tested so that key health resources are drawn from, and remain within, the community they serve. Reciprocity, in this framing, is not a courtesy but a design requirement for sustainability.

The study’s final recommendation reaches further than any single screening campaign. Faith institutions, the researchers argue, should be embedded into long-term national health policy, giving religious networks a permanent, recognized role in the architecture of hypertension prevention and care rather than a temporary one in donor-funded projects. Achieving that, they caution, requires commitment from all partners from the beginning, along with a genuine understanding of how effective faith leaders can be in supporting and promoting healthy lives. For a country where one in three adults carries elevated blood pressure and where the formal health system is stretched thin, the message of the research is at once modest and radical: the most trusted health communicators in many Nigerian communities are already in place, already willing, and already waiting to be treated as partners rather than gateways.

Subject of Research: The role of faith leaders and religious institutions in hypertension screening, education and prevention partnerships in Lagos, Nigeria

Article Title: Faith leaders offer untapped key to hypertension crisis, research shows

Article References: Faith leaders offer untapped key to hypertension crisis, research shows. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: hypertension, faith leaders, Nigeria, Lagos, public health, cardiovascular disease, University of York, community health, health partnerships, screening, social determinants of health, Frontiers in Public Health