Health equity screening tool

The health equity screening tool is part of the Foundations for Wellbeing approach.

The tool can support us all to think about how our services, facilities, or infrastructure impact on health inequalities.

By knowing the impact, we can take action to serve our communities equitably. This helps us to achieve our corporate priorities to deliver better services and care for the vulnerable.

The tool helps us to identify:

  • strengths of our service, facility, or infrastructure regarding its contribution to reducing health inequalities
  • opportunities to further strengthen our service, facility, or infrastructure to address health inequalities

The tool also helps us to consider any unintended consequences such as introducing new inequalities or increasing existing ones.

It is important that we consider health equity at all levels of our work. Our policies and strategies ultimately feed into the services, facilities, and infrastructure being delivered on the ground.

Recommendations

We recommend you revisit the health equity screening tool throughout the lifecycle of a service, facility, or infrastructure.

For example, you can use the tool to:

  • influence discussion and action at the development phase
  • review your progress and ensure inequalities in health continue to be considered and addressed

A strength of this tool is that it promotes conversation.

Using the tool in a group can help to broaden discussion. A group can bring fresh perspectives on inequalities and impacted population groups that may not have been considered before.

As part of this, it is important that we acknowledge the collection of inequalities that can affect an individual or group, in combination.

Download the tool