What is HEAT?

The tool has 4 stages:

1. Prepare
2. Assess
3. Refine and apply
4. Review

HEAT has similarities to other health equity assessment tools, but is a lighter-touch yet still systematic framework for assessing and driving action on health inequalities. It provides an easy-to-follow template which can be applied flexibly to suit your service or work programme. Its specific prompts ensure consideration of multiple dimensions of health inequalities.

It is designed to be completed at the start of a work plan or service development activity to help you consider its potential effects, but it can be used retrospectively.

In practice, your assessment is likely to be iterative and will help you continuously improve the contribution of your work to reducing health inequalities.

Because tackling health inequalities at scale is likely to require ‘buy-in’ from senior leaders in your organisation or the system you work in, we recommend that the use of the HEAT process is sponsored by a senior leader.

Gloucestershire County Council has developed a local HEAT template for colleagues across the system to download, save and work on. The template provides a simplified version of the tool and some guidance to get you started.

We have amended the tools locally so that they are easier to use, and whilst we have tested these (as demonstrated in the case studies tab), we need to continue to test these and learn from these experiences to find out how they are working and how they can be improved.

Download the Gloucestershire HEAT tool template (DOCX, 27.1 KB)