A health equity impact assessment umbrella program (AAPRISS) to tackle social inequalities in health: program description.

BACKGROUND: The failure to simultaneously address two objectives (increasing the average health of the population and reducing health inequalities) may have led to what has been observed in France so far: an overall decrease in mortality and increase in inequality.

OBJECTIVE: The Apprendre et Agir pour Réduire les Inégalités Sociales de Santé (AAPRISS) methodology is to analyze and modify interventions that are already underway in terms of their potential impact on health inequalities. It relies on partnership between researchers and actors in the health field, as well as policy makers. In this paper, we describe the program and discuss its feasibility and acceptability.

METHODS: This program is not a single intervention, but a process aiming at assessing and reshaping existing health programs, therefore acting as a kind of meta-intervention. The program develops scientific and methodological support stemming from co-construction methods aimed at increasing equity within the programs. Stakeholders from prevention policy-making and the health care system, as well as researchers, collaborate in defining interventions, monitoring their progress, and choosing indicators, methods and evaluation procedures. The target population is mainly the population of the greater Toulouse area. The steps of the process are described: (1) establishment of AAPRISS governance and partnerships; (2) inclusion of projects; and (3) the projects' process.

DISCUSSION: Many partners have rallied around this program, which has been shown to be feasible and acceptable by partners and health actors. A major challenge is understanding each partner's expectations in terms of temporality of interventions, expected outcomes, assessment methods and indicators. Analyzing the projects has been quite feasible, and some modifications have been implemented in them in order to take inequalities in health into account.