GRANT
We must be precise when we talk about inequality in health
Associate Professor Lasse Nielsen from the Department of Media, Design and Educational Sciences has received DKK 3 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark for a project that seeks to develop new and more precise concepts for investigating inequality in health.
Increasing health inequality in the Danish welfare state is currently an area of focus. Although we should in principle have equal access to health services and hospitals, levels of health and access to treatment are unequally distributed in Danish society.
Currently, "inequality in health" encompasses a wide range of areas, including areas that go far beyond the hospital system's purview. But what are we really talking about when we talk about inequality in health? And how can we formulate precise concepts so that we can start to do something about the problem step by step?
The project 'A Constrained Concept of Health Inequality' examines how such concepts might be used and how health inequality can be conceptualized in a way that makes sense in relation to theories of fair distribution of health services?
The goal is not to find a “truer” concept of health inequality, but to create a new understanding that can help clarify health inequality as an important policy problem that can be operationalized.
Meet the researcher
Associate Professor Lasse Nielsen is a researcher at The Department of Design, Media and Educational Science