Probing key informants' views of health equity within the World Health Organization's Urban HEART initiative.

To date, no studies have assessed how those involved in the World Health Organization's (WHO) work understand the concept of health equity. To fill the gap, this research poses the question, "how do Urban Health Equity Assessment and Response Tool (Urban HEART) key informants understand the concept of health equity?", with Urban HEART being selected given the focus on health equity. To answer this question, this study undertakes synchronous electronic interviews with key informants to assess how they understand health equity within the context of Urban HEART. Key findings demonstrate that: (i) equity is seen as a core value and inequities were understood to be avoidable, systematic, unnecessary, and unfair; (ii) there was a questionable acceptance of need to act, given that political sensitivity arose around acknowledging inequities as "unnecessary"; (iii) despite this broader understanding of the key aspects of health inequity, the concept of health equity was seen as vague; (iv) the recognized vagueness inherent in the concept of health equity may be due to various factors including country differences; (v) how the terms "health inequity" and "health inequality" were used varied drastically; and (vi) when speaking about equity, a wide range of aspects emerged. Moving forward, it would be important to establish a shared understanding across key terms and seek clarification, prior to any global health initiatives, whether explicitly focused on health equity or not.

Evaluating healthy cities: A scoping review protocol.

BACKGROUND: The Healthy Cities project supports municipal policymakers in the struggle to safeguard the health of urban citizens around the world (and in other limited geographies such as islands). Although Healthy Cities has been implemented in thousands of settings, no synthesis of implementation experiences have been conducted. In this article, we develop a scoping review protocol that can be applied to collect evidence on process evaluations of Healthy Cities. METHODS: To develop a scoping review protocol that could identify experiences evaluating the Healthy Cities project, we followed the PRISMA guidelines for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). We applied these guidelines in consultation with a research librarian to design a search of the peer-reviewed literature, specifically Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Web of Science Core Collection, and Scopus databases, and a grey literature search. DISCUSSION: In addition to the aim of collecting evidence on Healthy Cities process evaluation experiences, the broader goal is to spark discussions and inform future evaluations of Healthy Cities. This work can also inform other evaluations of initiatives seeking to raise socio-political change, such as those focused on enhancing intersectoral and multisectoral action.