The field of global health is founded on a deficit-based conceptualisation of health that overlooks the inherent value of communities, leading to top-down interventions that struggle to reach their full potential for effecting positive change. It remains unclear the extent to which current global health metrics follow this trend and reinforce it, or whether they encourage strategies to shift toward the World Health Organisation’s positive conceptualisation of health beyond the absence of disease. This white paper provides a scoping review of mainstream public health measures and the indicators that they contain, as well as an introduction to holistic health measures, found through academic search engines and grey literature. Indicators were compiled and sorted into thematic categories for comparison. The analysis found that most widely-used health metrics measure change in the burden of specific diseases, aggregated into population-wide statistics, neglecting the social and environmental determinants of health. There was little overlap in the indicators used by these frameworks, with each one measuring disparate topics. Holistic frameworks, founded on more inclusive concepts of health, contain promising ideas but lack impact, in part due to their lack of quantification. This research informs Stema’s vision for a new approach to global health, using concepts such as resourcefulness and novel participatory methods fused with data science to create truly innovative approaches to understanding, measuring, and ultimately pursuing health in ways that uplift and support communities to thrive.
