Monitoring socioeconomic inequalities in health in Hong Kong: insights and lessons from the UK and Australia.

In many developed countries such as the UK and Australia, addressing socioeconomic inequalities in health is a priority in their policy agenda, with well-established practices and authorities to collect and link selected health and social indicators for long-term monitoring. Nonetheless, the monitoring of socioeconomic inequalities in health in Hong Kong remains in a piecemeal manner. Also, the common international practice to monitor inequalities at area level appears to be unsuitable in Hong Kong due to its small, compact, and highly interconnected built environment that limits the variation of neighbourhood deprivation level. To enhance inequality monitoring in Hong Kong, we aim to draw reference and lesson from the UK and Australia to explore the feasible steps forward regarding collection of health indicators and contextually appropriate equity stratifiers with strong implication on policy actions, and discuss potential strategies to promote the public awareness and motivations for a more comprehensive inequality monitoring system.

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© 2022 The Author(s).

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

MR declares that his institution has a contractual research and evaluation partnership with Health and Wellbeing Queensland, an organisation whose work is cited in the article. He leads multiple funded projects as part of this partnership and was an advisor on a recent project to support preliminary work to inform their development of a Queensland Equity Framework, which is mentioned in the article. Health and Wellbeing Queensland has had no involvement in the inception, development or submission of this article. GKC, MM, and JW declare no competing interests.