Program and public policy

There is no shortage of reasons for public health actors to want to form ties with municipal governments, given the major role played by municipalities in shaping the living environments of their residents and the effects of these living environments on health. The reasons for forming ties with municipal actors can be more or less clearly defined and more or less ambitious: to learn from each other, to better coordinate respective actions, to propose a collaborative project that takes…

The intent of this briefing note is to introduce some tools developed in recent years to facilitate the integration of health issues into the decision-making processes of sectors whose primary concern is not population health. It is not the product of a comprehensive review of the various support instruments for health-related decision making, but rather a review of tools associated with the HiAP approach that have been the subject of publications. Most of them are aimed at the municipal…

Increasingly, the concept of solidarity is being brought into discussion as one of the principles and values that should guide the ethical practices of public health actors.¹ Reflecting on ethical issues specific to solidarity as it relates to public health practice appears worthwhile because solidarity is a concept that first and foremost concerns groups or communities of people. Viewed from this perspective, solidarity is a value that, for some authors, seems…

A public health ethics must begin with recognition of the values at the core of public health, not a modification of values used to guide other kinds of health care interactions (Baylis, Kenny, & Sherwin, 2008, p. 199).

Public health practitioners have long grappled with ethical issues in their practice but, until recently, there have been few relevant ethics frameworks that take into account the values base of public health.¹ Historically, those…

Health in All Policies (HiAP) is an increasingly important approach for systematically addressing the social determinants of health at all levels of government. HiAP refers to “an approach to public policies across sectors that systematically takes into account the health implications of decisions, seeks synergies, and avoids harmful health impacts in order to improve population health and health equity”.

In Canada, HiAP is on the radar of several governments, organizations and…

This document presents an exercise to be used in conjunction with the briefing note, Policy Approaches to Reducing Health Inequalities, which we advise you to read before doing the exercise. This document is available at: https://www.ncchpp.ca/141/publications.ccnpps?id_article=1548

We hope to provide practical experience in distinguishing between the different approaches and to stimulate reflection…

In 2019, the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP) reached out to Dr. Trevor Hancock to discuss ways to introduce the core ideas of ecological economics to public health practitioners and decision makers. Some of those ideas were previously exposed in a 2015 report on the ecological determinants that Dr. Hancock led for the Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) (Hancock, Spady, & Soskolne, 2015).

Those discussions eventually took…

The purpose of this document is to equip public health actors to conduct an ethical analysis of policies that are said to be paternalistic. It aims to provide the conceptual tools needed to identify paternalistic policies and assess the ethical burden with which they may be associated. The document also offers practitioners a clear and structured approach intended to guide ethical deliberation about paternalistic policies.

The NCCHPP produced a Scan of Mental Health Strategies to show what is being developed in the field of population mental health across Canada. This Scan provides an overview of mental health and wellness and related strategies through comparative tables and summaries, with a particular emphasis on work related to the promotion of mental health and the prevention of mental illnesses.

The NCCHPP produced a Scan of Mental Health Strategies1 to show what is being developed in the field of population mental health across Canada. This scan provides an overview of mental health and wellness and related strategies through comparative tables and summaries, with a particular emphasis on work related to the promotion of mental health and the prevention of mental illnesses.