Data Resource Profile: WHO Health Equity Monitor (HEM)

The Health Equity Monitor (HEM) is one component theme of the Global Health Observatory, the main statistics repository of the World Health Organization (WHO). Launched in 2013, HEM is a collaboration between: the WHO Department of Information, Evidence and Research (Geneva, Switzerland); the WHO Gender, Equity and Human Rights Team (Geneva, Switzerland); and the International Center for Equity in Health (ICEH) based in the Federal University of Pelotas (Pelotas, Brazil). HEM was created as a resource to promote and enable global and national health inequality monitoring, particularly within lowand middle-income countries, where data availability may be limiting. The practice of health inequality monitoring requires health data that are disaggregated by population subgroups (i.e. by dimensions of inequality); to this end, HEM contains high-quality, disaggregated health data that are comparable across countries and over time. Currently, reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) is the featured topic of HEM, which contains indicators categorized under the following subthemes: reproductive health interventions; maternal health interventions; newborn and child health interventions; RMNCH interventions (composite index); and health outcomes. Data are disaggregated by dimensions of inequality including education, economic status, place of residence, subnational region and child’s sex (where applicable). The two main components of HEM are the data repository and the theme page. The HEM data repository contains re-analysed (secondary) data taken from large-scale, nationally representative household health surveys: Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). The primary data were collected at the household level from women aged 15–49 years. The HEM data repository contains data from nearly 250 DHS and MICS conducted in 94 countries during 1993–2013 (Table 1); almost three-quarters of these countries had surveys available from at least two time points. The data repository covers 34 RMNCH indicators, which are grouped by specified themes. The tables of the repository can be filtered according to indicator, dimension of inequality, country, year and data source. The HEM theme page supports the interpretation and reporting of the data from the repository. It contains a range of resources such as: