Equity and Fairness in Health - an Applied Approach to Ethics

This course is not taught anymore. It has been replaced with the course "Introduction to priority setting in health" (BCEPS300/BCEPS900)

Objectives:
The participants will learn how to evaluate equity in access to health services and fairness in distributions of health outcomes, and to integrate tools for equity concerns and health maximization.

Content:
Part 1: Will cover theoretical concepts of equity and fairness as well as health maximization, and how they are applied in global and national health care priority setting.

Part 2: Will cover hands-on exercises in equity analysis, starting with assignments in excel, moving to ADEPT (Software platform for equity analysis developed by the World Bank), and Stata with DASP (Distributive Analysis Stata Package).

Part 3: Take home exam, essay with data analysis and discussion.

On completion of the course the student should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

• Know the different key concepts and theories for distributional fairness
• Know key global policy responses to health challenges, and understand key frameworks of health care priority setting in practice in selected low-, middle- and high income countries
• Understand the difference between data on average population coverage for a health service, and data on distribution of coverage disaggregated according to key determinants
• Understand the difference between data on average population coverage for a health service, and data on distribution of coverage disaggregated according to key determinants

Skills

• Able to explain and justify distribution of scarce resources according to utilitarian, egalitarian and prioritarian principles, and how they apply to health
• Able to describe milestones in global health priority setting, as articulated in the Alma Ata declaration, MDGs and SDGs.
• Able to describe health care priority setting in WHO, UK, Norway, Thailand, Mexico, Ethiopia and Tanzania
• Theoretical essay
• Know how to explore and describe DHS data and and present standard descriptive statistics on level and distribution
• Describe data set
• Know how to analyze DHS data using Stata and DASP to estimate inequity in coverage using common inequality measures such as concentration index and Gini and to present results graphically using concentration curves

General competence

• Understand key elements of distributive theories.
• Understand longitudinal global epidemiological and demographic trends and local adaptations to health care priority setting
• Able to describe a data set in terms of level and distribution of the variable of interest, and link it to relevant theoretical frameworks
• Able to analyze a data set in terms of average level and distribution of the variable of interest, and discuss results in the context of recent research contributions. link it to relevant theoretical frameworks