Primary care interventions against health inequities remain narrow in scope, review finds

Most primary care interventions designed to reduce health inequities have been relatively simple in design and aimed at narrowly defined vulnerable populations, according to a scoping review published in BMC Primary Care. The review, led by Mar Miralles-Pascual and colleagues including Ildefonso Hernández-Aguado, set out to gather key information for designing context-aware, equity-centred interventions in primary care settings.

The researchers followed the methodological framework of Arksey and O’Malley and the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines. They searched PubMed, SCOPUS and Web of Science comprehensively for interventions designed to prevent or reduce health inequities in primary care, selecting studies against predefined inclusion criteria. The evidence synthesis ultimately included seventy-three studies.

The interventions identified were highly heterogeneous. Most involved expanding primary care teams with additional health workers. A second major group comprised interventions with three or more multidisciplinary components focused on prevention or patient management. Nearly half of the interventions aimed to improve access to preventive care, and almost one fifth focused on a single disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Only a minority of the interventions were evaluated with rigorous experimental designs: just 27% were assessed through randomised controlled trials. Few studies assessed interventions targeting structural factors, the review found, and evaluations of complex interventions addressing such factors were scarce.

The authors conclude that the majority of the reviewed interventions were constrained in scope, being relatively simple in design and primarily targeting populations defined by a narrow set of vulnerability characteristics. They note that the scarcity of evaluations of complex interventions addressing structural factors, together with the paucity of interventions targeting heterogeneous populations, highlights the need for further research in these areas. The review was published as open access on 28 October 2026.

Subject of Research: Scoping review of primary care interventions designed to reduce health inequities

Article Title: Scoping review on primary care interventions to reduce health inequities

Article References: Miralles-Pascual, M., Chilet-Rosell, E., Canals-García, B., Campos-Serna, J., & Hernández-Aguado, I. (2026). Scoping review on primary care interventions to reduce health inequities. BMC Primary Care. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-026-03621-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12875-026-03621-x

Keywords: primary care, health inequities, scoping review, preventive care, multidisciplinary interventions, type 2 diabetes, randomised controlled trials, structural factors, BMC Primary Care, Scoping, review, primary