Monitoring health inequalities is essential to achieving health equity: it is essential to know who is being left behind in order to be able to tackle existing inequalities and ensure equitable access to quality health services for all. Health inequality monitoring should be an integral part of a country’s health information system. The Health Equity Assessment Toolkit (HEAT and HEAT Plus) is a software application that facilitates the assessment of health inequalities. This course covers how this software application can support the analysis and use of disaggregated data as an input for equity-oriented policy making.
Language: English
Health topic
Course information
Overview: Equity is essential to the Sustainable Development Goal principle of ‘leaving no one behind’, as well as central to the WHO GPW13 objective of ‘serving the vulnerable’. Health inequality monitoring is an essential starting point for building more effective and more equitable policies, programmes, and practices.
The Health Equity Assessment Toolkit (HEAT and HEAT Plus) is a software application that facilitates the interpretation and reporting of health inequality data and thereby supports capacity building for the integration of this evidence in policy making processes. The toolkit is available in two editions: HEAT (Built-in Database Edition), which comes with the WHO Health Inequality Data Repository pre-installed; and HEAT Plus (Upload Database Edition), which allows users to upload and work with their own datasets.
This course provides a practical guide on how to use both HEAT and HEAT Plus to assess inequalities. The target audience is monitoring and evaluation officers, data analysts and other technical officers with an interest in data analysis and reporting. The course may also be of interest to students and researchers.
Course duration: Approximately 1.5 hours
Certificates: A Certificate of Achievement will be available to participants who score at least 80% of the total points available in the final assessment. Participants who receive a Certificate of Achievement can also download an Open Badge for this course. Click here to learn how.
What you'll learn
- Describe the features and functionality of HEAT and HEAT Plus
- Access the software.
- Navigate the tool’s interface and use the selection, options, benchmarking and download menus.
- Use the tool to explore inequality in a setting of interest and compare inequality across settings using both disaggregated data and summary measures.
- Explain the variables in the HEAT Plus template.
- Check that a disaggregated dataset meets the HEAT Plus template criteria.
- Upload and manage datasets within HEAT Plus.
Course contents
Introduction:
This introduction module sets the scene for the course by defining health inequality monitoring and introducing the purpose of the Health Equity Assessment Toolkit.Module 1: HEAT and HEAT Plus interface:
Module 1 covers the interface of HEAT and HEAT Plus. By the end of this module, you will: describe the similarities and differences between HEAT and HEAT Plus; how to access the software; and how to navigate through the tool’s interface.Module 2: Explore inequalities in a setting of interest:
Module 2 covers how to use HEAT and HEAT Plus to explore the situation of inequality within a setting of interest. By the end of this module, you will: use both disaggregated data and summary measures to explore inequality in a setting of interest; compare the situation of inequality across multiple indicators and dimensions; recognize the visuals available in the ‘Explore inequality’ component of HEAT/HEAT Plus; and use the selection, options and downloads menus.Module 3: Compare the situation of inequality across settings:
Module 3 covers how to use HEAT and HEAT Plus to compare the situation of inequality in one setting with the situation in others. By the end of this module, you will: use both disaggregated data and summary measures to compare the situation of inequality across settings; recognize the visuals available in the ‘Compare inequality’ component of HEAT and HEAT Plus; and use the benchmark menu.Module 4: Prepare and manage data for HEAT Plus:
Module 4 covers preparing and managing your own datasets for analysis with HEAT Plus. By the end of the module you will: describe the variables in the HEAT Plus template; check that a disaggregated dataset meets the HEAT Plus template criteria; and manage uploaded datasets within the HEAT Plus software.Final Assessment
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Certificate Requirements
- Gain a Record of Achievement by earning at least 80% of the maximum number of points from all graded assignments.
- Gain an Open Badge by completing the course.