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Health Equity: What We Can Learn from the World

When it comes to advancing health equity, good ideas have no borders.

Like in the United States, countries around the world are grappling with how to make sure everyone in their communities has a fair and just opportunity to live the healthiest life possible.

Advancing health equity is emerging as a top priority for European nations, across the Americas, and in other countries like Singapore, Australia, and South Africa.

In the United States, we can look to examples of how our global counterparts are tackling equity in a variety of areas that affect health and well-being from poverty, to structural racism and colonialism, to gender inequality, to social injustice,…

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Articles of Interest

Our Race to Health Equity

Johnson & Johnson aspires to help eradicate racial and social injustice as a public health threat by eliminating health inequities for people of color.

Achieving health equity: a roadmap to eliminating disparities

Health disparities are avoidable and unfair, and they should not exist. Despite this, they persist even in the most advanced health systems, impacting on people’s health, life expectancy and access to healthcare. The differences that create health disparity arise from a variety of factors, such as a person’s economic situation or where they live, as well as individual characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender.

Equity in health care improves people’s health

Equity-oriented health care means paying particular attention to those at greatest risk of poor health and that typically means people who are most affected by the negative impacts of social conditions such as poverty, lack of affordable housing, stigma, racism and other forms of discrimination.

Facing the uncomfortable possibility that healthcare is discriminatory

When Covid struck and BAME patients died disproportionately, students of health inequalities were not surprised

Health equity and COVID-19: global perspectives

The COVID-19 is disproportionally affecting the poor, minorities and a broad range of vulnerable populations, due to its inequitable spread in areas of dense population and limited mitigation capacity due to high prevalence of chronic conditions or poor access to high quality public health and medical care.

Health equity: Your health outlook depends on where you live - but the private sector could change that

In many ways, the world is healthier than ever before. The rate of extreme poverty is falling, standards of living are rising and overall life expectancy has significantly improved. This progress is not the full story, however. Health inequities — gaps between the health of different groups — have long characterized global health. The persistence of these inequities reflects an urgent need to close the health gaps that threaten our progress on health.

Making Global Health Equity The Basis Of Health Education

Health equity has become a hot topic, a guiding principle, and in some cases a main objective for many in the health sector. Few institutions, however, can profess as pragmatic or pervasive a commitment to this ideal as the University of Global Health Equity, a private, Rwanda based medical and public health school founded in 2015 and wholly owned by Partners In Health.

Shaping a more equitable world for health and wellbeing

Health equity requires communities, government, civil society, and the private sector to come together to drive systems change. Together they can target the root causes of disparity and the non-medical drivers of health to achieve health equity.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the need for an equity-focused global health agenda

The current crisis underscores why the pursuit of health equity should remain the top priority in global health. But it also lays bare the gap between the equity ambitions of the global health field and healthcare realities. The attention that the pandemic has brought to social and health inequalities may offer an opportunity to address that shortcoming.

Toward Better Outcomes And Equity In Healthcare: Turning Pandemic Adaptations Into Lasting Transformation

These advances have saved lives, and though born out of necessity, serve as a foundation towards a holistic long-term vision for sustained acceleration. With so much changing so quickly, it is easy to lose sight of how this foundation paves the way for years of future advances—which is why defining the vision is so important.

Resources

Health Equity Initiative

Health Equity Initiative (HEI) is a member-driven nonprofit membership organization dedicated to build a global community that engages across sectors and disciplines to advance health equity. By bringing together and enlisting the efforts of the public and private sectors, professions and communities that have both a stake and an influence on social determinants of health, HEI advocates for improving conditions and achieving equity in health for all.

Global Health Equity Network

Advancing diversity and inclusion to ensure health and wellness for everyone, everywhere.

Health Equity International

Health Equity International is dedicated to providing essential health services to the people of southern Haiti, especially the most vulnerable.

CDC

CDC’s vision for global health equity is a world in which everyone can achieve the highest attainable level of health, and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or any other socially, economically, demographically, or geographically defined circumstance or physical condition

Center for Global Health Equity

Meaningful change must connect research with public policy, education and training, and local programs and healthcare systems to impact global health equity outcomes in positive ways.

University of Global Health Equity

The University of Global Health Equity stands alone in both its focus on equity and its proximity to health systems that face the very challenges that students will grapple with in the classroom.

WHO

Equity is the absence of unfair, avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically or by other dimensions of inequality (e.g. sex, gender, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation). Health is a fundamental human right. Health equity is achieved when everyone can attain their full potential for health and well-being.