Local Implementation of Equity in Health Research, Policy, and Practice

When health systems carry bias, people suffer and die unnecessarily, resources are wasted on programmes that do not work for everyone, and costlier fixes are needed later than if the work had been designed right from the start. Community members are not just beneficiaries of this work but its essential leaders: as experts in their own lived experience, they understand how health systems actually function and where they fail, and meaningful change cannot happen without them driving implementation from conception through evaluation.

TGLF's equity implementation model uses TGLF’s HEART framework to help local actors - community members, health professionals, researchers, and policymakers together - spot the three main types of inequity operating in their own research, programme, or policy, ask simple diagnostic questions to check whether the work treats all people fairly, and implement practical fixes once bias is found. The model draws directly on real examples from TGLF's global network of practitioners, from community care to national policy, because the patterns of prejudice are often similar across very different settings even though the fix must be local.

This is TGLF's Impact Accelerator applied to equity: local actors move from root-cause analysis of the specific bias in their own context, to designing a fix, to implementing it and sharing what worked with a network of peers doing the same work - not a one-off bias-awareness session.

TGLF is seeking EU partners and funding to extend this implementation model into new health research and policy settings, and to embed it as a cross-cutting quality standard across other Horizon Europe Health Cluster-funded projects.