Conceptualizing Healthcare Equity: A New Research Guide for Understanding Access
Rey Flores, a PhD candidate at the Brown School of Public Health, has authored a new SDOH Research Guide, Conceptualizing Healthcare Equity. This Guide addresses the factors that impact equitable access to healthcare services across scales to provide readers with foundational theory and practical measures that are common across research in this area.
In this Guide
The Guide takes readers through the Socio-Ecological Model, a theoretical framework that examines how factors at different scales impact healthcare service access. At each scale, Flores presents information about factors and available data, with an emphasis on freely available data. The Guide also provides readers with an overview of Penchansky & Thomas’ (1981) Theory of Access, before diving into best practices for applying measurements of healthcare equity in practice, and concluding with open access data resources.
Be sure to check out this Research Guide to explore the theoretical frameworks, multi-scalar approach, and variety of data sources all valuable to understanding and undertaking healthcare equity research.
About the Author
Rey Flores, BSW, MA is a doctoral candidate at Brown University's School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral and Social Health Sciences. Their research interest focuses on the intersection of policy, community health, and access and utilization to healthcare services, with a specific interest in transgender and gender diverse health outcomes in the US.
About the Research Guides
The SDOH & Place Project works to build a community of practice around the definition & use of community-level SDOH data. To support these efforts, our SDOH Guides help focus and refine best practices and approaches in measuring distinct SDOH indicators or structural drivers of health at community or regional scales.
The guides are written by new and emerging scholars across the fields of SDOH research, including geography, social science, and public health, and reviewed by experts in the field. Each one takes an SDOH topic, breaking down the jargon to clarify understanding and providing direct recommendations. The research guides will continue to be updated according to research directions that unfold.
Interested in writing or reviewing a Research Guide? Learn more here.
