Measuring Health Disparities
This interactive course focuses on some
basic issues for public health practice -- how to
understand, define and measure health disparity. This
course examines the language of health disparity to come
to some common understanding of what that term means,
explains key measures of health disparity and shows how
to calculate them. This computer-based course provides a
durable tool that is useful to daily activities in the
practice of public health.
The material is divided into four
Parts I and II review what health
disparities are, how they are defined, and provide an
overview of common issues faced in measuring health
Parts III and IV introduce users
to a range of health disparity measures, providing
advantages and disadvantages of each, and discuss how
best to use different measures to communicate and
evaluate health disparity in our communities.
By the end of the first content section
(which includes Part I What are Health Disparities? and
Part II Issues in Measuring Health Disparities), you
will be able to:
Identify the dimensions of health
disparity as described in Healthy People 2010
List three definitions of health
Interpret health disparity in
graphical representations of data
Explain relative and absolute
Describe how reference groups can
affect disparity measurement
By the end of the second content section
(which includes Part III Measures of Health Disparities
and Part IV Analytic Steps in Measuring Health
Disparity), you will be able to:
Describe at least three complex
measures of health disparities
List strengths and weaknesses of at
least three health disparity measures
Summarise the analytic steps in
measuring health disparity
This course, while self-paced, can be
expected to take between two to three hours to complete.
The various health disparity measures are explained with
interactive slides and audio commentary. Real-world
examples illustrate concepts and carefully thought-out
exercises help build knowledge.
The CD-ROM is designed to be accessible
to a broad audience of practitioners across all sectors
of the public health and related workforce who are
concerned about the issue of health disparity. Parts III
and IV are more technical; although not required, it is
helpful to have a background in statistics,
epidemiology, or other related sciences for ease of
understanding these sections.
Continuing Education Credit and
For continuing education credit or
completion certificate, you may complete the entire
course or the first two parts (Parts I & II).
Certificates are awarded upon submission of an
evaluation and successful completion of the relevant
tests. (There is a post-test covering Parts I & II and
another covering Parts III & IV.) The computer-based
course contains a link to the evaluation and post-tests,
which are online.
Parts I & II provide 1.5 Contact hours
in Nursing, 1.5 credits for social work continuing
education, or 1.0 Contact hours for CHES; the entire
course (Parts I-IV) provides 3.3 Contact hours in
Nursing, 3.3 credits for social work continuing
education, or 3.0 Contact hours for CHES.
Additional information about social
work, nursing and CHES continuing education provisions
is available on the Career Advancement page of our
This course has been classified as
"knowledgeable" by the criteria of the Council on
Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice,
based on depth of material covered and length of course.
Downloadable computer file
download the course immediately and then install it
on your hard drive. The course is password-protected.
To download computer file, click
here. File size is
68.2 MB and will take about five minutes to download
with a high-speed bandwidth.
To obtain course password, click
here. (There is a
link to obtain the password, once you begin the
Installation instructions. This computer-based course
is PC-based and not Macintosh-compatible.