Health Inequalities Research: New Methods, Better Insights?

A new generation of scientific methods are helping to better understand health inequalities in Europe, but investments in data infrastructures are required to make use of its full potential for informing policymaking, European academies say in a new report.

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck disadvantaged groups in society much more severely than others. As a result, the health gap between socio-economic groups has widened, exacerbating inequalities long known to researchers. A better understanding of these inequalities is therefore more important than ever.

In the Health Inequalities Research: New methods, better insights? report published today, experts from the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) and the Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM) evaluate scientific methods to study health inequalities with the aim of helping to narrow the health gap across Europe.