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.