Equitap (“Equity in Asia-Pacific Health Systems”) consists of participants from more than seventeen institutions in Asia and Europe. It was established in 2000 to jointly work on examining equity in national health systems in the Asia-Pacific region. The project is an initiative of the Asia-Pacific National Health Accounts Network (APNHAN), and is inspired by the European ECuity Project, which has pioneered collaborative and comparative research on equity in health systems in Europe. APNHAN’s original proposal, which was to undertake a collaborative study of equity in Asian health systems by extending research on health expenditure measurement, was developed by a grant to the network by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2000. This idea was substantially expanded in 2001 by joining up with researchers from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and London School of Economics, made possible by the award of an INCO-DEV grant by the European Commission to the collaboration.
Equitap partners are drawn from a wide range of institutions, ranging from government health ministries through academic research centres to for-profit consultancy firms. Yet they share the same goals, which have been to extend scientific and technical methods for assessing equity and inequity in health systems, to deepen research collaboration within Asia and between European and Asian researchers, to document the actual performance of individual health systems, and to strengthen national capacities for health systems research in the Asian region. To achieve these goals, Equitap works by joint collaboration between partners and sharing of technical expertise by leading researchers in Europe and Asia to establish its basic methods, and then regional peer-support to individual national teams to undertake their own analyses.
Equitap has benefited from the beginning from the generous support of many sponsors, partners and professional colleagues. Other than the original INCO-DEV grant support, the work of the consortium has been made possible by individual grants and contracts to individual partners to support technical development, in-country work and consortium meetings and dissemination activities. Equitap has also benefited from the continuous support and collaboration of the WHO regional offices in the Asia-Pacific: SEARO and WPRO, and WHO country offices in Beijing and Jakarta.
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