Tackling Health Inequalities –
What are we seeking to achieve?
1. Listening to and working with communities
- Leadership and staff buy in for listening to and working with communities to improve health and wellbeing and tackle health inequalities.
- Supporting a local Poverty Truth Commission to engage in deep listening with communities and breaking down stigma.
- Actively working with community partners using available data to understand where community health inequalities are within a place.
- Working with identified communities to understand needs, experiences and assets to drive down health inequalities.
- Co-producing solutions with communities with increased levels of health inequalities and those identified as harder to reach.
- Participating in learning environments around health inequalities.
- Providing access to resources to reduce inequalities such as translators.
2. Taking a targeted approach to where and how resources are spent
- For Public Sector organisations, using a weighted approach to calculate resource allocation line with inequalities within the population, for example the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD).
- Using a targeted approach to ensure resource distribution and allocation in line with inequalities. For Public Sector organisations this may be more obvious but for private sector organisations it would be worth considering how philanthropic funds are distributed.
- Using innovative methods to measure the success of interventions and services that considers the impact on health inequalities.
3. Encouraging continuous learning and development around health inequalities
- Visible leadership support for learning and development opportunities focused on reducing health inequalities.
- Providing staff training and opportunities for learning about health inequalities.
- Providing teams with the tools and resources they need to feel empowered to address health inequalities as part of their work.
- Recruitment of champions to support the workforce in addressing health inequalities.
