The international and community-wide implications of the health gap between cities has been systematically investigated by the WHO Healthy Cities Project, which addressed the problem of reducing inequity as well as inequality. City health profiles act as a series of monitoring reports, which describe health needs and health gaps, providing the rationale for city health plans. The development of a city health profile is instrumental as an initial policy step to reduce health gaps. Prevention and degree of personal choice are used to distinguish between group health differences due to inequalities and inequities. As discussed in a previous section, health inequalities are unavoidable or based largely on personal choice, associated with individual risk factors; health inequities are due to preventable unjust conditions, largely not under direct personal control, and associated with social causes, such as the relative distribution of access to resources rather than average level of access.