Equity
CHE’s Equity research aims to help decision makers improve equity in the distribution of health and health care.
We have a track record of developing influential new equity methods, including methods for fair geographical resource allocation and distributional cost-effectiveness analysis. We work with various national and international partners to adapt and use our methods to help improve equity in their own settings.
Research topics
DCEA is a general term for various ways of analysing equity in the distribution of costs and effects as well as value for money in terms of aggregate costs and effects. Find out more on our DCEA resources page, where you can find the following:
- Introductory resources to get a basic understanding of what DCEA is all about
- Technical training resources for those who want to conduct DCEA
- Methods development resources for people who want to criticise, refine and improve DCEA methods
- Networking resources including links to professional networks in this area and other relevant institutions and websites
- Other resources including old resources that may still be of interest
CHE’s research in this area has developed methods for monitoring health care equity in local health care planning areas. These methods are now used by the NHS to track change over time, benchmark local performance against similar areas, and find out what impacts local decisions are having on health care inequalities. CHE staff continue to work with partners in the UK and elsewhere to develop and refine these methods.
We reproduce below some of the basic health equity monitoring materials and tools developed in previous methodological research, in case they provide useful ideas for researchers and analysts elsewhere in the UK or overseas.
- Local equity data packs 2009-2018
- CCG Inequalities Visualisation
- Equity Dashboards (MS Excel
, 1,865kb) - Equity Chartpacks (PDF
, 3,475kb)
Health equity monitoring for healthcare quality assurance. Social Science & Medicine 2018.
Health equity indicators for the English – final report to the NIHR HS&DR Programme. HS&DR 2016
CHE’s research in this area has investigated how much people care about reducing social inequality in health (“equity”) versus improving average health (“efficiency”). We have found widespread concern for reducing social inequality in health among people of all ages, political persuasions and social backgrounds.
Our standard questionnaire approach to this issue - sometimes called the “benefit trade-off approach” - has been used in various countries, and has also helped to spur methodological research to develop and test alternative questionnaire methods.
The aim is to understand the views of members of the public, decision makers and stakeholders about health inequality, and how and why those views vary. This information can help decision makers assess how much extra they should be willing to pay, if anything, for health care and public health interventions that help to reduce health inequality. More specifically, it can help decision makers handle trade-offs between reducing health inequality and improving total health in ways that are consistent and aligned with public views, by setting suitable benchmarks and ranges of “equity weights” for health gains and losses to more socially disadvantaged groups (as measured e.g. by area deprivation, ethnicity or other indicators of social advantage).
