Equity and specific populations

Review authors and decision makers increasingly recognize the importance of the impact of interventions on health equity. Five issues are important for formulating the review question: defining health equity; hypotheses related to equity and logic models; appropriate study designs; appropriate outcomes; and context. For equity questions, baseline imbalance across PROGRESS-Plus factors may be important to assess by checking for poor randomization. Further, equity factors may be considered as potential confounders in non-randomized studies. Equity analysis involves three steps: first, identifying in the protocol which populations are likely to experience health inequity; second, assessing whether the intervention results in important improvement; and third, assessing whether the identified populations achieve the same improvement in both absolute and relative effects as other populations. Interpretation of evidence for specific populations defined across PROGRESS-Plus should focus on those populations identified at the protocol stage as important recipients of the intervention.