So, there are different ways in which inequity and
health can occur, and different ways in which we want to measure it.
So inequity in health usually occurs in some strata, such us by household income,
expenditure or wealth, by sex, or by place of residence.
There may be differences in health coverage or health quality.
Between, for example, poor and wealthy households, between men and women,
or between rural and urban areas.
There can be different aspects of inequity in terms of outcomes.
So, it may be that the risk of a particular disease or
illness differs between groups.
For example, poor people will smoke more, or richer people smoke more.
There may be differences in disease, so
some parts of the community may be a higher risk of disease than others.
This may apply to death as well.
And it may also apply to the social consequences of illness.
So it may be that for wealthy people blindness is not a particularly serious
problem, but for poor people it can be catastrophic.
So, we need to be able to measure all these different aspects of
inequity in all of these different strata.
And finally, there are different dimensions of inequity.
It may be that there are differences in access to care, or
in access to treatment, for different household incomes, or areas.
But it may be that, although people have the same access,
they experience different quality of care, or they face different costs of treatment.
So we need to look at all of these different aspects of inequity.
There are two ways of measuring health and equality.
We have simple measures, which just basically do pairwise comparisons between
two subgroups of the population.
For example, the wealthy and the poor.
We also have complex measures, which use all available data from
different subgroups in the population assess inequality.
And typically, these measures, that says the distribution of a health outcome
rather than differences between two groups.
And there are two types of inequality we can measure.
Absolute, which is the basic measure of whether or not people are poor or not.
And relative, which measures the differences between groups
without consideration to their absolute poverty.