Leaving no one behind” is at the heart of the agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals, requiring that health systems be vigilant to how interventions can be accessed equitably by all, including population subgroups that face exclusion. In the World Health Organization (WHO) South-East Asia Region, inequalities can be found across and within countries but there has been a growing commitment to examining and starting to tackle them. Over the past decade in particular, WHO has been developing an armamentarium of tools to enable analysis of health ...

City Deals’ are new governance instruments for urban development. Vast evidence exists on the relationship between urban factors and health equity, but little research applies a health equity lens to urban policy-making. This paper does precisely that for the Western Sydney City Deal (WSCD) in Australia. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of publicly available documents and interviews with the WSCD’s main architects, applying insights from relevant theories. We find ‘pro-growth’ discourse to encourage economic investment dominates any ...

Background Countdown to 2015 tracks progress towards achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5, with particular emphasis on within-country inequalities. We assessed how inequalities in maternal, newborn, and child health interventions vary by intervention and country.

In India, despite improvements in access to health care, inequalities are related to socioeconomic status, geography, and gender, and are compounded by high out-of-pocket expenditures, with more than three-quarters of the increasing financial burden of health care being met by households. Health-care expenditures exacerbate poverty, with about 39 million additional people falling into poverty every year as a result of such expenditures. We identify key challenges for the achievement of equity in service provision, and equity in financing and ...

Background: This study aims to assess geographical distribution of hospitals and extent of inequalities in hospital beds against socioeconomic status (SES) of residents of five metropolitan cities in Iran. Methods: A cross-sectional analysis was conducted to measure geographical inequality in hospital and hospital bed distributions of 68 districts in five metropolitan cities during 2016 using geographic information system (GIS), and Gini and Concentration indices. Correlation analysis was performed to show the relationship between the SES and ...

This article develops the concept of “reign-seeking” to capture the unprecedented collective action of the Thai professional and official elite prior to the 2014 military coup and the establishment of a military regime. It argues that this phenomenon reflects broad and deep political dynamics, for which the dominant scholarship on authoritarianism and Thai politics cannot adequately explain. The changing incentives of these supposedly non-partisan actors are interwoven with neo-liberal governance reform driven by a desire for depoliticisation and ...

Background Coverage levels for essential interventions aimed at reducing deaths of mothers and children are increasing steadily in most low-income and middle-income countries. We assessed how much poor and rural populations in these countries are benefiting from national-level progress.