WHO Health Inequality Monitoring Course Series

Overview

Now more than ever, many health inequalities across and within countries are recognized as preventable, unfair and unacceptable. Health inequality monitoring is an essential starting point for building more effective and more equitable policies, programmes, and practices. Monitoring inequalities is necessary to characterize current realities, evaluate the impact of actions, and indicate where changes are still needed. This course helps learners to become familiar with the basics of health inequality monitoring, why it is important and how it can be carried out. No prior knowledge about health inequality or experience conducting health inequality monitoring is required. The target audience for this course includes monitoring and evaluation officers, health programme managers and policy makers. The course is also suitable for anyone with a general interest in the topic of health inequality monitoring.

Health inequalities exist in every population. A health inequality refers to an observable difference in health between subgroups in a population. With the necessary data, health inequalities can be measured, compared and tracked over time.

Health inequality monitoring entails quantifying and assessing health inequalities in a defined population to inform where changes are needed to advance health equity.

This channel includes training courses about the foundations of health inequality monitoring, its application to specific topics and skill building.

New WHO eLearning course series, ‘Health Inequality Monitoring Foundations’, addresses the need for capacity strengthening in health inequality monitoring. This five-course series is delivered in a self-directed learning environment designed to meet the immediate learning needs of users. It is primarily targeted to monitoring and evaluation officers, researchers, analysts, and others with a general interest in health data and inequality monitoring.

Courses

Five new courses on the OpenWHO platform will address the need for capacity strengthening in health inequality monitoring:

• The Overview course gives a general introduction to the health inequality monitoring cycle and related key terminology and concepts.
   
• The Data sources course examines the strengths, limitations and opportunities to improve common data sources for health inequality monitoring, as well as the processes of data source mapping and data linking.
   
• The Health data disaggregation course explores how disaggregated health data are integral across the steps of monitoring, and guides learners in assessing and reporting disaggregated data.
   
• The Summary measures of health inequality course discusses the general characteristics of simple and complex summary measures, and guides learners through the selection, calculation, interpretation and reporting of a range of measures.
   
• The Reporting course demonstrates the components of high-quality health inequality reporting, emphasizing purpose-driven, audience-centred, and technically rigorous approaches.