CDC’s Global Health Equity Strategy
July 12, 2023
Posted In: Reinforce and expand partnerships
Purpose
To advance health equity principles and approaches within and throughout CDC’s global public health science, interventions, partnerships, policies, and infrastructure.
Description
CDC’s Global Health Center (GHC) strengthens public health equity goals and increases collaborative efforts with partners and countries globally. GHC advances health equity in more than 60 CDC country and regional offices and in countries where CDC does not have a permanent presence.
In January 2021, the Office of the Associate Director for Science recognized the need to adapt health equity in the global context. Over the span of 18 months a core team comprised of representatives across GHC divisions with consensus by CDC country offices and other global programs in the agency developed CDC’s first strategy on health equity specifically for global programs.
GHC’s Global Health Equity Strategy is a comprehensive approach to advance health equity among CDC’s global programs. This framework builds upon existing approaches in gender equity and human rights to specifically address availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of global health programs. It acknowledges that the right to health can be pursued by numerous and complementary approaches.
The strategy aims to center the reduction of global health inequities as a fundamental component of CDC’s global public health work. Therefore, specific programmatic and cross-cutting goals provide the framework to help countries eliminate disparities in health and in highlighting the determinants of health that adversely affect groups that have been historically, socially, or geographically excluded or marginalized.
GHC is implementing this strategy by establishing four distinct workstreams to intentionally address health equity in our science, research, and interventions; policy, partnerships, and communications; implementing mechanisms; and monitoring and evaluation. GHC established these workstreams by identifying a lead and division-level points of contact to bolster our current work, identify gaps, and leverage successes.
Early Impacts
The implementation of the strategy has led to progress in disseminating information and resources on CDC’s Global Health Equity webpage. GHC also led an effort to systematically track the way in which CDC advances health equity in science, research, interventions, and policies. With systems-level changes in place, GHC can track and monitor how global programs advance health equity and strategically direct efforts to meet communities experiencing disadvantage where they are. However, recognizing the need to strengthen staff capacity in health equity science and related concepts, GHC developed a training to ensure a common shared understanding of health equity and how to achieve health equity in CDC’s global programming and science. To date, GHC has trained over 100 staff, many of which are locally employed staff. CDC Cambodia and Vietnam adapted health equity concepts to their country context to appreciate the unique historical and contemporary injustices each country experiences that create and perpetuate health inequities. Both country offices have forged a path to bake health equity into their day-to-day office work to ensure the communities they serve achieve the highest attainable level of health.