Evidence and global health equity
Seeking real-life accounts from all walks of life
World Evidence-Based Healthcare (EBHC) Day is celebrated on 20 October. Led by JBI at the University of Adelaide, the 2023 campaign, ‘Evidence and Global Health Equity’ aims to examine how the global evidence community can foster and embed equity within and across evidence ecosystems to advance global health equity.
What is global health equity?
Global health equity is mutually beneficial and power-balanced partnerships and processes leading to equitable human and environmental health outcomes on a global scale.
- August & Tadesse et al. (2022) from The Center for Global Health Equity, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the University of Michigan.
What are evidence ecosystems?
An evidence ecosystem is the local, national and/or global community(ies) of actors who commission, fund, produce, synthesise, disseminate, translate and use research evidence; the formal and informal relationships between them; and the policies, practices and structures which facilitate and underpin their interactions.
The organising partners of World EBHC Day, JBI, Cochrane, Campbell Collaboration, GIN and NICE seek real-life accounts of how evidence was used to drive more equity in the health system, or how the use of evidence led to potential or real inequity in health.
"The World EBHC Day 2023 campaign aims to inspire a collective drive among individuals and organisations to challenge the status quo and embrace a new paradigm of evidence generation and utilisation. We hope to help drive progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals"
- Bianca Pilla, Chair of World EBHC Day.
The World EBHC Day steering committee, chaired by Bianca Pilla, Director of Global Relations at JBI, invites healthcare professionals, patients, students, researchers, policymakers and academics to share their experiences around health equity in a blog.
“If you have worked on an evidence synthesis project or other health research project that has incorporated equity guidelines, please tell us about your experience in a blog. If you are a patient partner or advocate, can you tell us about a time that you were involved in a project that led to more equitable and locally relevant health interventions or policies? We would love to hear from clinicians who have advocated for policy or practice change to improve health equity at their workplace or community. If you have a story, please share it!
Topic suggestions for blogs include:
- Challenges faced in overcoming inequity in the evidence ecosystem
- Examples of successful research co-production initiatives that have led to more equitable and locally relevant health interventions or policies
- The inclusion of different voices and stakeholders to achieve equity in the generation of evidence and its use
- Collaborations or initiatives that have effectively addressed the disparities in research capacity and learning access, leading to improved health outcomes and/or greater equity in research contributions
- Establishing equitable governance in global health partnerships, ensuring diverse perspectives are represented and valued in decision-making processes
- Examples from funding bodies promoting equity in research funding, ensuring that resources are directed towards projects that address health inequities and benefit disadvantaged communities
- Examples of monitoring and evaluation approaches that have led to meaningful changes in health equity outcomes, and how can these approaches be scaled up
- Initiatives that have changed systems or processes to prioritise health equity, and lessons learned from their implementation
Blog submissions close 20 September. For blog author guidelines and more information for submitting a blog for World EBHC Day, please visit https://worldebhcday.org/take-action