Table 3 Immediate priorities identified for various types of research

I. Descriptive research

∙ Persons living with physical or psychosocial disabilities; their health conditions beyond their disabilities, such as sexual and reproductive health; within-group variations by marital status, caste/tribal status/religion/location/combinations of these (e.g. the health of women living with disabilities in tribal communities)

∙ Health inequities across different communities in north-east India and their particular contexts

∙ Health inequities experienced within Dalit and Adivasi populations, e.g. Valmikis as compared to better-off Dalit groups, nomadic tribal groups

∙ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex (LGBTQI) communities: desk review on policy and law, and overall health status across states of India

∙ Studies on inequities in health conditions and utilisation of healthcare services beyond maternal and child health

∙ Features of curricula/pedagogies address sexuality and gender in medical and allied health professions

∙ Structural determinants of access to healthcare by workers in the informal sector (by gender, caste, age, geographic location)

∙ The burden of mental health of people who experienced violence (interpersonal/social/communal/conflict-related) across gender and age

II. Explanatory research related to social mechanisms and processes

In the immediate future, the focus needs to be on building theoretical, conceptual and methodological tools to make such research possible

∙ A conceptualisation of processes of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, stigmatisation, marginalisation to better understand how social position results in unequal access to social determinants of health and health services

∙ Interfaces and interactions of macro-meso-microlevel factors in understanding health inequities

∙ Processes through which certain groups of people are rendered invisible in data. Alternatively, determinants of collection or non-collection of data on specific groups and categories of people, on some conditions versus others

∙ The process of evolving methodologies that capture the dynamics of health inequities without assuming static, timeless categories (for example, by caste, gender or economic position)

III. Explanatory research related to health system

∙ The impact of the growing presence of corporate private sector on access, availability, quality and affordability of healthcare

∙ The impact of philanthro-capitalism on global and national health governance, its consequences, and its impact on the corporate private sector

∙ The challenges in aligning bottom-up planning, top-down financing, and choice of technology (strategy and design), to assess if the tension between the three remain the same for groups across the social gradient

∙ Reasons why districts with similar levels of social determinants differ in terms of health system performance, features of governance that make the difference

∙ Perception of health workers/providers on the scope of community participation across the levels of the health system

IV. Intervention research

∙ Documentation of successful pilots, projects, innovations that have broken the barriers to equity and worked with the marginalised populations to see how some of them can be upscaled and integrated into the health system

∙ Type of interventions that worked or did not work for healthcare providers/health system to become responsive to specific needs of vulnerable groups (e.g., LGBTQI, migrants, people with disabilities, sex workers)

∙ Interventions that work to increase accountability to and participation by vulnerable groups

∙ Implementation and impact of Maternal Death Review for different populations (e.g. increased maternal death reporting, increased action taken over deaths reported, influence on the identification of ‘high-risk’ groups)

∙ Best practices of convergence models that bring out better health and nutrition outcomes especially of vulnerable groups

∙ Interventions that result in increasing the visibility and voice of marginalised groups

∙ Interventions that attract and retain workers to serve in marginalised areas