The Relevance of Health Equity to the Evidence Synthesis Process: Results From a Quantitative Survey of Health Information Professionals

Background In their work as research collaborators, health information professionals often contribute both extensive knowledge of evidence synthesis methods and an engaged awareness of the sociopolitical context in which evidence synthesis takes place. Within this context, researchers are increasingly being encouraged to demonstrate how their work will advance health equity. Our study sought to determine how confident health information professionals feel discussing health equity in an evidence synthesis context and how relevant they think it is to the process. Methods Using the email lists of U.S.-based and international library organizations, the authors conducted a quantitative survey of health information professionals with experience working on evidence synthesis projects (e.g., systematic or scoping reviews) within the past 10 years. The authors used the survey software Qualtrics to calculate descriptive statistics for each of the survey questions and analyze correlations between responses to different questions. Results While a majority of health information professionals surveyed exhibited both familiarity with health equity as a concept and a belief in its relevance to evidence synthesis, far fewer were highly comfortable discussing health equity with researchers. Only 6% of participants had used the PRISMA-Equity Extension (a health equity-centered evidence synthesis tool) in a systematic review. Discussion The study results suggest that a number of health information professionals would benefit from training on health equity-centered evidence synthesis tools and more experience having health equity-related research discussions.