Health Equity and Health Inequity of Disabled People: A Scoping Review

Health equity is an important aspect of wellbeing and is impacted by many social determinants. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is a testament to the lack of health equity and the many health inequity issues based on social determinants experienced by disabled people. The health equity/health inequity situation of disabled people is even worse if their identities intersect with those of other marginalized groups. Many societal developments and discussions including discussions around the different sustainability pillars can influence the health equity/health inequity of disabled people. The general aim of this study was to better understand the academic engagement with the health equity and health inequity of disabled people beyond access to healthcare. To fulfill our aim, we performed a scoping review of academic abstracts using a hit count manifest coding and content analysis approach to abstracts obtained from SCOPUS, the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST, Web of Science, and PubMed. Health equity and health inequity abstracts rarely cover disabled people as a group, less with many specific groups of disabled people, and even less or not at all with the intersectionality of disabled people belonging to other marginalized groups. Many social determinants that can influence the health equity and health inequity of disabled people were not present. Ability-based concepts beyond the term ableism, intersectionality-based concepts, and non-health based occupational concepts were not present in the abstracts. Our qualitative content analysis of the 162 abstracts containing health equity and disability terms and 177 containing health inequity and disability terms found 65 relevant abstracts that covered problems with health equity disabled people face, 17 abstracts covered factors of health inequity, and 21 abstracts covered actions needed to deal with health inequity. Our findings suggest a need as well as many opportunities for academic fields and academic, policy, and community discussions to close the gaps in the coverage of health equity and health inequity of disabled people.