Health Equity Roadmap
This roadmap is intended to take health departments, CBOs, providers, and community health workers on a journey to understand health equity fundamentals and how they may be applied to increasing vaccine access, awareness, and confidence for diverse communities.
How Can My Organization Build Health Equity Capacity?
Over the next several months, the VRH will lead you on a health equity journey. The intention is to provide VRH resources grouped in a way that helps you implement health equity principles within your organization. We are providing a variety of resources – they may not all resonate with you, but hopefully you will find some that do. The journey will introduce health equity core concepts, provide guidance for implementing health equity into your work, share tools for tracking and sharing the outcomes of these efforts, and discuss ways to work with specific communities.
Here we lay a foundation by providing definitions and frameworks to round out one’s understanding of health equity. When reviewing these resources, consider how these concepts can be applied to a variety of health and health care topics, including increasing vaccine access, awareness, and confidence.
Generations of racism and maltreatment have resulted in some communities being less trustful of government initiatives, including vaccination. These resources present context that may result in someone being distrustful of vaccination.
A core function of equity work is to reduce disparities in health outcomes. To do this, it is important to know how to find and collect both numeric (quantitative) data and descriptive (qualitative) data that describe health in different communities, as well as how to interpret the information. This section provides sources of information and ideas for measuring and monitoring health disparities.
Community partnerships can increase the relevance and effectiveness of equity work. These resources can help CBOs, local health departments, and community members build and sustain strong partnerships.
Engaging communities relies on trust. Resources in this section can help build trust through effective communication with communities, including using plain and inclusive language.
Before any organization can effectively address health equity externally, they must look at their own culture, policies, and practices to ensure equity is being addressed from the inside-out. These resources provide tools for evaluating and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within your own organization.
Health equity work requires financial resources. This section provides general funding information and information on funding health equity specific work.
Organizations may want to evaluate their efforts, whether that be to report back to funders, or for their own continuous quality improvement. Resources in this section provide evaluation frameworks, or more simple quality improvement guidance.
Dissemination of information is key to providing information back to the community you work with, or funders who may have reporting requirements. There are many formats that dissemination can take – social media, reports, data visualizations, and more. Resources below can be adapted to tell the story of your health equity journey.
Dive Deeper
These resources provide more detailed information for further exploration.
The Health Equity Roadmap provides an introduction to concepts and actions that organizations can take to advance health equity. However, there is much more information available on the VRH. These resources may be of interest for those looking to delve more deeply into equity concepts.
