Helping Public Health Practitioners Navigate Health Equity
A group of researchers from Western Canada have come together to try and help public health practitioners navigate the large pool of health equity resources available.
College of Nursing Assistant Professor Dr. Wanda Martin is one of the members working on the Equity Lens in Public Health (ELPH) project led by Drs. Bernie Pauly and Marjorie MacDonald from the University of Victoria. ELPH is a 5-year (2011-2016) research program funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
“There are so many health equity tools available to practitioners that it’s overwhelming,” said Martin. “By creating this inventory of health equity tools, or our “Practitioner Toolkit” as we’ve called it, we want to help people working in public health make sense of the growing number of tools available. We are hoping that by providing a descriptive summary of the tools, practitioners will be able to spend less time trying to find what they are looking for and more time actually improving health equity.”
What is a health equity tool? For this particular project, the researchers have defined a health equity tool as a document or resource that clearly identifies improving health equity as a goal and provides a set of steps, questions, or a framework that people can follow to achieve this goal. By “tool”, they mean a document or resource that either assesses the degree to which health equity is included in policies or programs, measures health equity or promotes the inclusion of health equity in policies or programs.
Why has this team decided to focus so much energy on health equity? “Poor health is a reality for many Canadians, not because of poor choices, but because of the conditions in which they live and work,” says Martin. “Our team is hoping to improve these conditions, by helping the public health practitioners increase attention and resources to address the conditions that contribute to poor health. Creating this toolkit has been a lot of work, but a lot of fun!! We’ve searched peer-reviewed and grey literature, nine databases, screened the results for relevance and reviewed background documents. Each document was screened by at least two members of our team.”
Learn more about the Equity Lens in Public Health program here or directly access the toolkit here.