Evaluating Health Equity: Your Role and Where Do You Start?
Channel: Community Science
Date: 2023-06-05

Too often, evaluators are asked to assess the effectiveness of strategies without exploring inequities in the system, structural injustices and power dynamics that affect outcomes. Evaluators have a key role in addressing health inequities.  Beginning from the planning phase of evaluation and progressing through the phase of interpreting findings, you can use your skills to increase health equity by examining structural racism that has led to health inequities. By challenging assumptions, evaluators can change the narrative around what works and why when assessing program effectiveness. One step is to ask questions during the evaluation such as: Who is the strategy working for, and who is it not working for?  What conditions are needed to be successful?  What capacities are needed? What power dynamics are affecting the outcomes? Evaluators need to ask these questions and others in order to make the systems changes to improve health inequities

Annapurna Ghosh and Michelle Revels of Community Science’s Health Equity Practice Area, discuss how to plan and design an evaluation that includes guidance on addressing the root causes of health disparities and provide guidance on how to address some common challenges that arise.