Health Equity Resources

Guides on Health Equity

• Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health Report
• King County Equity and Social Justice Initiative
• The Marmot review final report, “Fair Society, Healthy Lives” – This report proposes new ways to improve everyone’s health and reduce inequalities that it describes as ‘unfair and unjust’. It concluded that, although health inequalities are normally associated with the poor, premature illness and death affects everyone below the wealthiest tier of English society. The health and wellbeing of today’s children, and of those children when they become adults, depend on us having the courage and imagination to do things differently, to put sustainability and well-being before a narrow focus on economic growth and bring about a more equal and fair society.” (Read chapter 1)
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America
• “Unnatural Causes” Policy Guide
• World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health

Federal and State Government Resources

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
• Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Office of Minority Health
• Children’s Environmental Health Disparities – U.S. EPA publications
• Health United States: An annual report on trends in health statistics
• HHS Data Council
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HRSA)
• Minority Health
• Health Literacy
• Kaiser Family Foundation’s State Health Facts Online
• National Center for Health Statistics’ FASTATS
• Think Cultural Health – An e-learning program providing oral health professionals with basic knowledge and skills related to cultural and linguistic competency, based on the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Minority Health’s National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (the National CLAS Standards).
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Office of Minority Health
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2007 National Healthcare Disparities Report

Health Equity Toolkits

• “A New Way to Talk About Social Determinants of Health” – A way to create more compelling, effective and persuasive messages that resonate across the political spectrum.
• Addressing the Social Determinants of Children’s Health: A Cliff Analogy – Tree dimensions of health intervention to help people who are falling off of the cliff of good health: providing health services, addressing the social determinants of health, and addressing the social determinants of equity.
• American Medical Association (AMA), Organizational assessment toolkit:  “Improving communication—improving care”:  the AMA Ethical Force program toolkit
  1. Intended to help health care organizations meet the needs of a diverse patient population.
  2. Assesses how effectively the organization communicates
  3. Can help organizations improve communication with all patient
  4. Questions focus on common communication problems, such as culture, language and health literacy gaps.
• CDC’s Healthy Communities Program – The centers for disease control and Prevention (CDC) and its partners are working together to create healthy thriving communities across the United States by reducing chronic diseases and attaining Health Equity through training, mentorship, dissemination of effective models, and investments in communities that jump-start local change. These population-based change strategies have been found to be an effective approach to improving the health of communities.
• Cultural competency and Anti-Oppression Resources/Tool  – The ClasActVirginia.org tool is a web-based resource guide designed to help health care providers meet the needs of Virginia’s changing demographics. Several search options are available to quickly refine your search among the numerous resources housed in the CLAS website. By entering a keyword, the year of publication, or the target population of interest into the search engine, you can easily find useful articles, websites, organizations and documents relevant to specific CLAS-related issues
• The HRET toolkit – A web-based tool that provides hospitals, health systems, clinics, and health plans information and resources for systematically collecting race, ethnicity, and primary language data from patients. Registration is free.  Development of the toolkit included input from a National Advisory Panel
• Race Matters – Toolkit from the Annie E. Casey Foundation designed to help decision-makers, advocates, and elected officials get better results in their work by providing equitable opportunities for all.
• The Community Tool Box: Promoting community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources
• THRIVE – THRIVE is a tool to help you understand and prioritize the factors within your own community that can help improve health and safety. The tool can help answer questions such as: How can I identify key factors in my community and rate their importance? How are these factors related to health outcomes? What can I do to address each factor? Where can I go for more information?

Additional Resources

• Kaiser Family Foundation’s State Health Facts Online
• National Women’s Health Resource Center
• Putting Women’s Health Care Disparities on the Map: Examining Racial and Ethnic Disparities at the State Level provides a rare state-level look at disparities among women of different races and ethnicities on a broad range of indicators of health and well-being. State-specific fact sheets and interactive maps and data tables that draw on the report findings are presented here.