Monitoring International Health Inequality

by Jon Scaccia September 5, 2023

The quest for health equity is critical in global health, and health inequality monitoring is essential in achieving this goal. An insightful article published in the International Journal for Equity in Health by Hosseinpoor et al. outlines important strategies for enhancing health inequality monitoring to promote health equity worldwide. In this blog post, we summarize and spotlight the central insights from this article.

The Challenges in Monitoring Health Inequalities

Monitoring health inequalities is a multi-faceted process with inherent challenges. Data availability is one major issue, as information on health outcomes and determinants is often scarce or incomplete, especially for marginalized groups. This makes accurately identifying and tracking health inequalities challenging.

Data quality is another obstacle. Even when data is available, it might not be reliable enough for accurate health inequality monitoring due to being incomplete, inaccurate, or inconsistent across different sources. This hinders comparisons of health outcomes across population groups and over time.

To overcome these issues, the authors advocate for utilizing various data sources, including administrative data, surveys, and health facility data. This approach helps ensure data availability from multiple sources and enables cross-checking for accuracy and completeness. Standardized indicators and methods are also crucial for maintaining data quality and comparability, allowing consistent data collection and analysis, facilitating comparisons of health outcomes across population groups and over time.

The authors also emphasize a comprehensive approach to monitoring health inequalities, including examining various health outcomes and determinants. This includes social, economic, and environmental factors impacting health outcomes. By addressing health inequalities holistically, it’s possible to identify and address the root causes rather than just treating the symptoms.

Policy Insights from Health Inequality Monitoring:

Health inequality monitoring is instrumental for policy development and improving health outcomes for marginalized populations. Policymakers can use this data to devise targeted interventions addressing the root causes of health disparities.

For instance, health inequality monitoring informed maternal and child health policy in India. By examining health outcomes and determinants across population groups, policymakers identified disparities and implemented targeted interventions to address them. This included increasing access to maternal and child health services, raising awareness, and offering financial incentives for prenatal care.

In Australia, health inequality monitoring helped improve health services access for indigenous populations. By tracking health outcomes and determinants, policymakers identified disparities and implemented targeted interventions such as increased funding for indigenous health services, enhancing cultural competency among healthcare providers, and encouraging community involvement in healthcare decisions.

The Importance of Expanding Health Inequality Monitoring

It’s vital to extend health inequality monitoring to cover more health outcomes, like mental health and non-communicable diseases. Health inequalities extend beyond infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and mental health and chronic diseases.

Expanding health inequality monitoring allows policymakers to identify disparities in these areas and create targeted interventions for marginalized populations. Monitoring mental health outcomes, for example, can reveal disparities in access to mental health services and inform interventions like increased funding, improved access, and raising mental health awareness.

The authors also stress community and stakeholder engagement to ensure health inequality monitoring is tailored to local needs and priorities. Collaborating with community members, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders helps identify pressing health issues and develop interventions in cooperation with those affected by health disparities.

Conclusion

Health inequality monitoring is a powerful tool for promoting health equity. Addressing monitoring challenges, leveraging monitoring data for policy development, and expanding monitoring to a broader range of health outcomes are essential steps toward a more equitable and just healthcare system for all.

Resources

Hosseinpoor, A. R., Bergen, N., Kirkby, K., & Schlotheuber, A. (2023). Strengthening and expanding health inequality monitoring for the advancement of health equity: a review of WHO resources and contributions. International Journal for Equity in Health, 22(1), 1-9.