Equity Guidelines

BCPHR — Health Equity Guidelines

BCPHR publishes scholarship that advances health equity. These guidelines describe what equity means in our editorial context and how authors can frame work to advance equity goals.

Why This Matters

Health Equity at BCPHR

Health equity is the principle that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. Achieving health equity requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences (powerlessness, lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care). BCPHR publishes scholarship that documents inequities, explains their causes, and identifies actions to remove them.

Equity vs Equality

Two Concepts, One Goal

Equality means treating everyone the same regardless of need. Equity means giving each person what they need to achieve the same outcome. In public health, equity is the more useful frame because health outcomes are shaped by unequal exposures, unequal access to resources, and unequal power. BCPHR uses the equity frame throughout the journal's mission and editorial standards.

Five Dimensions

What Health Equity Scholarship Examines

Distribution of Health Outcomes

How health outcomes vary across populations defined by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, geography, immigration status, and age.

Distribution of Determinants

How the social, economic, environmental, and political conditions that produce health are distributed across populations, and how that distribution itself reflects historical and ongoing inequities.

Access to Care

Who can reach health care services, when, and at what cost. Access barriers include cost, geography, language, immigration status, insurance, discrimination, and time.

Quality of Care

How the care that people receive varies once they have access. Disparities in clinical outcomes, in patient experience, and in the application of evidence-based treatment.

Power and Voice

Who decides what counts as a public health problem, what counts as a solution, and who has standing to speak for affected communities.

In Practice

How to Frame Equity in Your Manuscript

Equity Framing Checklist

Disaggregate data by relevant demographic and social categories
Explain why disparities exist, not just that they exist
Avoid framing affected communities as deficient or to blame
Name structural and historical causes where relevant
Use community-preferred language (e.g., "people who use drugs" rather than "drug abusers")
Include implications for policy and practice that address root causes
Acknowledge limitations honestly, including limitations specific to equity analysis

Language Matters

The words researchers use to describe communities shape how readers understand the work. BCPHR encourages authors to use language that reflects the dignity, agency, and humanity of the people being studied. Person-first language, community-preferred terms, and avoidance of stigmatizing labels are all part of this commitment.

What Equity Is Not

Common Misunderstandings

Equity is not the absence of difference: people will always have different needs, preferences, and circumstances. Equity is not lower standards: equity demands the same high quality outcomes for all populations. Equity is not separate from rigor: rigorous methods and equity framing reinforce one another. BCPHR publishes equity-focused scholarship at the same methodological standard as any other research published in the journal.

BCPHR Aligns with the Following International Publishing Standards. (Click to Open)

COPE Core Practices ICMJE Recommendations WAME Policies Declaration of Helsinki Foundation for Biomedical Research EQUATOR Network 16 Principles of Transparency PIE-J (NISO RP-16-2013)

What is PIE-J? PIE-J stands for Presentation & Identification of E-Journals, a National Information Standards Organization Recommended Practice (NISO RP-16-2013). It defines how online journals should present title history, ISSN, publication dates, and edition numbering so that librarians, indexing services, and citation databases can unambiguously identify and cite content. BCPHR follows PIE-J for its edition-to-year crosswalk and article-level identifier consistency, as recommended by PubMed Central.