A health inequality toolkit can serve different purposes. It can be a guide for planning, leading and using health needs assessments to better understand – and ultimately tackle – health inequalities within societies. It can present a framework that includes steps on how to achieve a particular goal, and it can provide practical guidance from for example a variety of proven tools or experienced experts.
Below you can find examples of existing health inequality toolkits.
Health Inequalities Intervention Toolkit | APHO and DoH, UK
This Health Inequalities Intervention Toolkit, developed jointly by the Association of Public Health Observatories and the Department of Health, focuses on improving life expectancy and infant mortality rates, especially in disadvantaged areas.
Based on local authority boundaries, it is designed to assist evidence-based local service planning and commissioning, including Joint Strategic Needs Assessments. The Toolkit does this by providing information on the diseases, which are causing low life expectancy in individual areas, enabling good local priority setting.
The Toolkit was originally designed to support achievement of the national Public Service Agreement target to: “Reduce health inequalities by 10% by 2010 as measured by infant mortality and life expectancy at birth.” Although the PSA target has now ended, the Toolkit should still be useful to the NHS and local government, supporting planning to narrow inequalities in life expectancy and infant mortality.
Monitoring Equity in Access to AIDS Treatment Programmes: A review of concepts, models, methods and indicators | WHO, EQUINET
This toolkit, produced by WHO and EQUINET, is a practical resource on how to apply the body of knowledge on health equity to monitoring the performance of AIDS treatment programmes, and offers insights for monitoring equity in other programmes.
Multiple Intervention Program (MIP) Tool Kit | University of Ottawa, Canada
The multiple intervention program toolkit is an interactive tool to help public health staff and managers strengthen the design and evaluation of multiple intervention programs and also to provide public and community health practitioners with resources to support co-ordinated and resource-effective comprehensive programming.
Multiple intervention programs are co-ordinated, interconnected interventions aimed at improving health by making changes to more than one level of a socio-ecological system. They’re based on the socio-ecological model of health, which recognizes that it’s the interaction between individual behaviour and social environments that shapes health. (Refer below to: Box A1 Principles of Ecological Approaches).
HEPP: Health Equity and Prevention Primer | Prevention Institute, USA
The Health Equity and Prevention Primer (HEPP) was developed to serve as an online learning tool for public health practitioners, consisting of an equity-focused curriculum and collection of resources to build the knowledge and capacity to incorporate health equity into work and activities.
The Primer is comprised of seven brief, interactive presentations along with selected publications, tools, and other resources focused on health equity.