A Qualitative Exploration of Indicators of Health Equity Embeddedness Among Public Health Policy Advocacy Campaigns

Abstract

There are socioeconomic and racial/ethnic health disparities that warrant policy change to advance health equity. The purpose of this qualitative study was to elucidate primary activities and/or tangible characteristics that indicate that a policy advocacy campaign has an embedded health equity focus. Researchers interviewed policy advocacy experts ( n = 13) and campaign leaders ( n = 9), transcribed audio recordings of interviews, and conducted a thematic analysis to examine health-equity-related processes within policy campaigns. Based on experiences of policy advocacy experts and campaign leaders, mostly within the Voices for Healthy Kids initiative, several objective aspects and activities were identified that indicate that a policy campaign, and the coalition that conducts the campaign, has an embedded health equity focus. It should be stressed that these activities are not intended to represent the extent of all campaign activities, only the subset of activities and aspects of a campaign that indicate a health equity orientation. Broadly, aspects identified were related to what had the campaign done to engage with the community, who in the community was providing input about direction of the campaign, and how had that community input been used. Authentic Community engagement was seen as the foundation of a campaign’s health equity focus. A model synthesizing these findings is included in the results. A major strength of this study is that factors associated with health equity in campaign functioning are not typically assessed. These findings support identification of associated constructs to inform measurement development, and can help guide organizations, campaigns, and researchers working to advance health equity.

Public Health Communication: Skin Cancer Prevention Implications

“…The conclusion is that targeted public health campaigns should be tailored to specific characteristics and needs of the target groups and be based on the using of specific channels of communication. These findings support the results obtained by other authors -that, in order to be effective and to bring social change, informational and educational programmes dedicated to cancer prevention must be focused and tailored in accordance with target group's attitudes, current knowledge level and informational and communication habits (Glanz et al, 2015;Calloway et al, 2021). By implementing preventive communication initiatives, bigger social changes can be expected.…”