ArticleInternational journal for equity in health2002
A Problem with the Individual Approach in the WHO Health Inequality Measurement.
Article in International journal for equity in health, 2002. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Scoping review of the World Health Organization's underlying equity discourses: apparent ambiguities, inadequacy, and contradictions.International journal for equity in health · 2021Article
- Using inequality measures to incorporate environmental justice into regulatory analyses.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2013Review
- Multilevel survival analysis of health inequalities in life expectancy.International journal for equity in health · 2009Article
- Is health inequality across individuals of moral concern?Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2006Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn the World Health Report 2000, the World Health Organization made the controversial choice to measure inequality across individuals rather than across groups, the standard in the field. This choice has been widely discussed and criticized. DISCUSSION: We look at the three questions: (1) is the World Health Organization's health inequality measure value-free as it claims? (2) if it is not, what is the normative position implied by its approach when measuring health inequality? and (3) is the individual approach a logically consistent methodological choice for that normative position? SUMMARY: We argue that the World Health Organization's health inequality measure is not value-free. If it was, the health inequality information that the measurement collected could not reasonably be included in its ranking of how well national health systems performed. The World Health Organization's normative position can be interpreted as a quite expansive view of justice, in which health distributions that have causes amenable to human intervention are considered to be matters of justice. Our conclusion is that if the World Health Organization's health inequality measure is to be interpreted meaningfully in a policy context, its conceptual underpinning must be re-evaluated.
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Registered trials
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