Healthy Communities Conversation on Health Equity: Summary

This is a summary of the conversations facilitated by Centre for Healthy Communities on May 3, 2022. The Healthy Communities Conversation focused on ‘What are some of the ways that we can reduce or address social and health inequities and who has a role in this?’

Key Highlights: 

• Equity is often associated with issues of accessibility, fairness, meritocracy, and power.
• To systematically target social and health inequities, it is important to first recognize that they exist within many systems. It is not a siloed issue. It is also critical for everyone to work together to draw attention to inequities and incorporate them into every conversation.
• Tackling inequities may be as straightforward as identifying the people missing from the conversation, unintended consequences of decision-making, drawing attention to the inequities that exist around us and incorporating it into every conversation we have.
• Tackling inequities involves identifying the people missing from the conversation and the unintended consequences of decision-making. It requires drawing attention to the inequities that exist around us and bringing those topics into our everyday conversations.
• In academia and workplaces, often a specific equity consideration that is discussed is ageism. This is of major concern as it can be associated with bias, privilege, age, and skillsets.
• Within the context of the pandemic, equity considerations have reached inside the home environment which encompasses both home and work settings.
  • These considerations are related to access to stable Wi-Fi, quiet workspaces, and ergonomic computer or work set-up.
• Within the Alberta landscape, there is a general lack of common equity indicators. This is an area in which we can work collectively on, to bring attention to, and reorient our approaches in our personal lives, within our workplaces and broader communities.

 Additional Links (shared through discussions):

• Health Equity Datasets Inventory: https://www.ualberta.ca/public-health/research/centres/centre-for-healthy-communities/resources/he_dataset_inv.html
• Poverty Simulation: https://www.myunitedway.ca/poverty-simulation/
• Stephanie Nixon’s Coin Model of Privilege and Critical Allyship: http://icdr.utoronto.ca/feat/coin-model-of-privilege-and-critical-allyship
• Privilege Walk adopted from Peggy McIntosh, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement: https://www.eiu.edu/eiu1111/Privilege%20Walk%20Exercise-%20Transfer%20Leadership%20Institute-%20Week%204.pdf
• Teaching students about Racial Prejudice: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/
• Article by The Institute for Healthcare Improvement Resources[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788483
• Social Well-Being Indicator Tracker: https://edmontonsocialplanning.ca/social-well-being/

 [1] This article only the abstract is available publicly.