Addressing health inequalities through engagement with people and communities

Summary

Collaborate with communities to ensure insights inform meaningful, equitable decisions that address the root causes of health inequalities.

Link to health inequalities

Exploring insights with communities experiencing health inequalities ensures that findings are relevant, meaningful and accurate, and are therefore more likely to address the root causes of any identified problems. Collaborative approaches also respect the knowledge and experiences of the community, building trust and a sense of ownership over any recommendations. Furthermore, ICSs’ Public Sector Equality Duty obligations require them to clearly show evidence of consideration of equality implications in their decision-making.

Activities, skills and resources

Emerging

• Routinely collect qualitative and quantitative insights from communities.
• Establish standardised approaches for recording and analysing data.
• Use community insights as part of decisions around strategic or commissioned service decisions.

Developing

• Triangulate insights from people and communities with other datasets.
• Identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
• Use as part of decisions around strategic or commissioned service decisions.

Maturing

• Build data literacy within communities to enable more effective collaboration in data exploration.
• Work with communities to interpret insights and identify shared priorities.
• Use as part of decisions around strategic or commissioned service decisions.

Thriving

• Use insights to create specific, actionable recommendations for addressing health inequalities.
• Establish transparent feedback and accountability mechanisms for communities.
• Regularly report back on progress and outcomes of data-informed actions.