Measuring health disparities
Author(s)/Editor(s): Lynch JW, Harper S
Publisher/Organizer: McGill University, and produced by the Michigan Public Health Training Center (MPHTC), Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health, and Prevention Research Center of Michigan
Publication date: 2009
Overview
This interactive course focuses on some basic issues for public health practice -- how to understand, define and measure health disparity. This course examines the language of health disparity to come to some common understanding of what that term means, explains key measures of health disparity and shows how to calculate them. This computer-based course provides a durable tool that is useful to daily activities in the practice of public health.
The material is divided into four content sections:
- Parts I and II review what health disparities are, how they are defined, and provide an overview of common issues faced in measuring health disparities.
- Parts III and IV introduce users to a range of health disparity measures, providing advantages and disadvantages of each, and discuss how best to use different measures to communicate and evaluate health disparity in our communities.