HEN Webinar Recording: March - Equity in health needs change in the system

Health Equity Network Monthly Webinar: March - Equity in health needs change in the system

This month's webinar brought together colleagues from The Curiosity Society — Lara Norris and Chris Wood — to explore how systems thinking can deepen our understanding of health inequalities and open up new possibilities for change.

Chris and Lara began by grounding the session in a key premise: health inequalities are not random — they are produced and sustained by complex, interconnected systems. Understanding those systems, rather than treating symptoms in isolation, is essential if we want to create lasting change.

Key themes and discussion points

Moving beyond linear thinking. A recurring theme was the limitations of linear, cause-and-effect approaches to change — particularly prevalent in biomedical and policy contexts. The Curiosity Society shared examples of non-linear theories of change they have developed with organisations including the Living Wage Foundation, which better reflect the messy, circular reality of how systems actually work.

Connectivity over activity. One of the most striking insights from Chris was the shift they are seeing among philanthropic funders: increasingly, investment is going into joining dots rather than simply making existing dots bigger. In other words, funding connectivity — cross-sector relationships, shared learning, cross-disciplinary working — as much as funding discrete activities.

Whose knowledge counts? Lara spoke about the importance of recognising that everyone holds a different mental model of a system, shaped by their experience and position within it. Effective systems change requires bringing those different perspectives into the room — and honouring them.

Questions and contributions from participants

The Q&A sparked a lively exchange. A participant raised the challenge of methodology — arguing that the rigid, linear frameworks dominant in biomedical research are ill-suited to the complexity of health equity work, and calling on the network (including UCL IHE) to look to political science, social science and other disciplines to shake up how we think about evidence and evaluation.

An occupational therapy student, noted strong resonances between systems thinking and occupational science — and asked whether The Curiosity Society was actively drawing on those fields. Lara confirmed that the team deliberately brings together people from very different backgrounds — psychology, strategy, product development — and surrounds itself with a wide network of associates, precisely because systems thinking cannot be siloed.

A useful provocation to sit with

If you were to draw a map of all the systems connected to health equity — housing, finance, education, employment — it would, as Lara put it, be "absolutely impenetrable." But it would also start to come close to what is actually happening. That tension — between legibility and reality — is one worth sitting with as we think about where to focus our efforts.

The recording is available HERE.