CHTI Health Equity Toolkit
The Community Health Training Institute's Health Equity toolkit is designed to help community members, stakeholders, organizations, and many more explore and tackle the roots of health inequity by addressing the social determinants of health. According to Healthy People 2020, health equity means achieving the highest level of health for all people, and it entails focused societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities by equalizing the conditions for health for all groups, especially for those who have experienced socioeconomic disadvantage or historical injustices. Creating a just and equitable society where all can participate and prosper requires the joint effort of many sectors, and we hope you can find some guidance in this toolkit.
What is Health Equity?
Introduction to Health Equity in Community Building
Brought to you by the Community Health Training Institute, this webinar aims to provide a broad overview of health equity and how to apply a health equity lens to community health work, particularly with an emphasis on building individual nad coalition capacy to engage diverse communities through empowering competant approaches.There are numerous barriers to such engagement; some conscious, and some unconscious. Race, class, and cultural communication styles all influence the ways in which diverse communities relate to the work. This webinar will introduce participants to health equity, culturally competent approaches, and how to think collaboratively about ways to effectively engage diverse populations/communities in their efforts. We also offer a Health Equity Training Series.
What is Health Equity? And What Difference Does a Definition Make?
From The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Health equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care. The purpose of this report is to stimulate discussion and promote greater consensus about the meaning of health equity and the implications for action within the Culture of Health Action Framework.
Roots of Health Inequity: A Web-Based Course for the Public Health Workforce
From NACCHO: Roots of Health Inequity is an online learning collaborative and web-based course designed for the public health workforce. The site offers a starting place for those who want to address systemic differences in health and wellness that are actionable, unfair, and unjust. Based on a social justice framework, the course is an introduction to ground public health practitioners in concepts and strategies for taking action in everyday practice.
Health In All Policies: Strategies to Promote Innovative Leadership
From ASTHO: In support of the National Prevention Strategy, ASTHO produced this innovative resource to educate and empower public health leaders to promote a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach to policymaking and program development. By collaborating across multiple sectors to address health disparities and empower individuals, promoting healthy communities, and ensuring quality clinical and community preventive services, we can increase the number of Americans who are healthy at every stage of life.
Social Justice and Health Equity
Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener's Tale
From The American Journal for Public Health: Dr. Camara Jones presents a theoretic framework for understanding racism on 3 levels: institutionalized, personally mediated, and internalized. This framework is useful for raising new hypotheses about the basis of race-associated differences in health outcomes, as well as for designing effective interventions to eliminate those differences. She then presents an allegory about a gardener with 2 flower boxes, rich and poor soil, and red and pink flowers. This allegory illustrates the relationship between the 3 levels of racism and may guide our thinking about how to intervene to mitigate the impacts of racism on health. It may also serve as a tool for starting a national conversation on racism.
Learn more and watch a video of Camara Jones telling the Gardener's Tale here
Race and Socioeconomic Factors Affect Opportunities for Better Health
From the Commission to Build a Healthier America: To understand health disparities, it is not enough to consider only race or only socioeconomic factors because both affect health. Dramatic differences in health among racial or ethnic groups in the United States have been observed repeatedly across a wide range of important indicators of health from the beginning of life through old age. For example, person’s income and education—along with other correlated characteristics including accumulated wealth, occupation and neighborhood socioeconomic conditions—can influence health in myriad ways. This report explores these topics more in depth.
Structural Racism and Health Inequities in the USA: Evidence and Intervention
Health Equity Data
500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
National Equity Atlas
Health Equity Action Guides
Urban Health Equity Asessment and Response Tool User Manual
From WHO: Urban HEART is a user-friendly guide for local and national officials to identify health inequities and plan actions to reduce them. Using evidence from WHO’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Urban HEART encourages policy-makers to develop a holistic approach in tackling health equity. Since the launch of the pilot programme in 2008, Urban HEART has been pilot-tested in cities in Brazil, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
Health Equity From the Inside Out: A Data-Driven Exploration of the Challenges and Best Practices for Operationalizing Health Equity
From ARCHE: The public health field has been instrumental in identifying how social determinants impact the health of individuals, families, and communities. We brought together leaders and community stakeholders to build consensus and incubate the best ideas that promote equity in key policy and program areas ripe for intervention or innovation. Its central focus is on changing policy, systems, practices and environments to affect the social determinants of health, and this report works to identify best practices, recommendations and innovative solutions that can be deployed by policymakers and the field at large to advance change.
A Practitioner's Guide for Advancing Health Equity
From the CDC: The comprehensive guide provides lessons learned and innovative ideas on how to maximize the effects of policy, systems and environmental improvement strategies—all with the goal of reducing health disparities and advancing health equity. It goes over Incorporating health equity into foundational skills of public health, along with maximizing healthy food and beverage strategies, tobacco-free living strategies, and maximizing active living strategies all to advance health equity
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