The Milbank Memorial Fund is an endowed operating foundation that publishes The Milbank Quarterly, commissions projects, and convenes state health policy decision makers on issues they identify as important to population health.
We focus on a number of topic areas identified by state health policy leaders as important to population health.
The Center for Evidence-based Policy at Oregon Health & Science University is a national leader in evidence-based decision making and policy design.
Keep up with news and updates from the Milbank Memorial Fund. Get the latest from thought leaders, including Christopher F. Koller, president of the Fund.
We publish The Milbank Quarterly, as well as reports, issues briefs, and case studies on topics important to population health.
March 2013 (Volume 91)
March 2013 | Gerry McCartney, Alastair H. Leyland, Colin M. Fischbacher, Bruce Whyte, David Walsh, Diane L. Stockton
Frank and Haw (2011) devised a set of criteria that can be used to evaluate the utility of frameworks for monitoring health inequalities. They argued that a high-quality monitoring framework should ensure the completeness and accuracy of reporting, that the measures used should be reversible and sensitive to intervention, that the measure should be statistically appropriate, and that there should be no reverse causation between the proposed outcome measures and the markers of socioeconomic status. They applied these to the Scottish Government’s long-term monitoring framework for health inequalities (Scottish Government 2011) to highlight the potential pitfalls for policymakers. While we welcome their description of the Scottish Government’s measures as “state of the art” and recognize that there is always room for improvement, we disagree with some aspects of their appraisal of the Scottish monitoring framework, as well as the criteria they proposed. We contend that their application of these criteria to the Scottish example reveals some of the limitations of their approach.
Author(s): Gerry McCartney, Alastair H. Leyland, Colin M. Fischbacher, Bruce Whyte, David Walsh, and Diane L. Stockton
Read on Wiley Online Library
Volume 91, Issue 1 (pages 186–191) DOI: 10.1111/milq.12006 Published in 2013
Previous article
Commentary: Persistent Social Inequalities in Health—Insensitive Outcomes, Inadequate Policies, or Both?
Next article
New Evidence on the Allocation of NIH Funds across Diseases