Health Equity Stratifiers

In order to document the existence of health inequities, data are needed on health status and health care measures. Health measures should include a broad range of health status and health care indicators. These can include: mortality, morbidity, risk behaviors, and quality of life indicators. Health care measures should include access and utilization of health care, preventive health care, quality of care, and health insurance. These need to be combined with indicators that reveal inequalities between groups. These indicators are often referred to as stratifiers; they divide populations into subgroups. From a health equity perspective, we will refer to these stratifiers as equity stratifiers.1 They include socioeconomic status, sex, race, ethnicity, geographic region and other social determinants of health.1 …show more content…
Often the tables highlight one type of health behavior such as a mammography screening for breast cancer, stratified by age, sex, race, etc. This type of data presentation documents health disparities for a specific condition or risk and highlights opportunities for public health intervention. However, the focus on one condition or risk factor at a time ignores how systematic disadvantage affects health across a range of health outcomes. To document the consistent relationship between health status and equity stratifiers, we propose making this relationship more explicit by documenting patterns and trends between different populations for many