Paper 2: themes from semistructured interviews

In the context of profound and persistent racial health inequities, we sought to understand how to define racial health equity in the context of systematic reviews and how to staff, conduct, disseminate, sustain, and evaluate systematic reviews that address racial health equity.

The study consisted of virtual, semistructured interviews followed by structured coding and qualitative analyses using NVivo.

Twenty-nine individuals, primarily United States-based, including patients, community representatives, systematic reviewers, clinicians, guideline developers, primary researchers, and funders, participated in this study. These interest holders brought up systems of power, injustice, social determinants of health, and intersectionality when conceptualizing racial health equity. They also emphasized including community members with lived experience in review teams. They suggested making changes to systematic review scope, methods, and eligible evidence (such as adapting review methods to include racial health equity considerations in prioritizing topics for reviews, formulating key questions and searches, and specifying outcomes) and broadening evidence to include designs that address implementation and access. Interest holders noted that sustained efforts to center racial health equity in systematic reviews require resources, time, training, and demonstrating value to funders.

Interest holders identified changes to the funding, staffing, conduct, dissemination, and implementation of systematic reviews to center racial health equity. Action on these steps requires clear standards for success, an evidence base to support transformative changes, and consensus among interest holders on the way forward.