Strengthening community connections important for overall well-being

Communities and neighbourhoods have the power to strengthen our understanding of what is needed to support and build systems for health and wellbeing, according to a new report from The National Collaborating Centres for Public Health (NCCPH) – especially after a global pandemic.

Working with community encourages building health equity, but what is health equity exactly?

According to Alberta Health Services, health equity is “the absence of socially produced unfair and unjust inequalities in health between groups with different levels of social advantage/disadvantage (social stratification). Assessing health equity requires comparing health and its social determinants between more and less advantaged social groups.”

Community knowledge allows for needs to be heard, understood, and respected. The report developed by the NCCPH set out four key action areas which public health in Canada can incorporate and support communities. The four key actions are to:

1. Strengthen the work of community health and wellbeing at the neighbourhood scale – by ensuring public health and community organizations are involved in health and social services which would strengthen links between community organizations and public health.

2. Ensure accountability for community involvement in governance and decision making – through funding and reporting requirements which incorporate accountability for community engagement and governance in public health.

3. Build community and equity into new data architectures – by supporting community through technology and data needs, which would link community organizations into learning public health systems.

4. Confront structural and historic barriers to systems transformations – by recognizing the history of inequities and address the imbalances between Canadian health and public health systems by building trust, collaboration, and collective impact.

The involvement of communities and community organizations are a core component of health equity and systems resilience. Healthy people lead to healthy communities, and community health is one approach to population health and wellbeing outside public health services.

One way southern Alberta, and specifically Lethbridge, is trying to address a healthier community is through a community conversation facilitated by Alberta Health Services Design Lab and Healthy Lethbridge Coalition. This spring a three-day forum was held with world-class speakers who shared their expertise on creating a healthy city roadmap; a place where citizens don’t just live – they thrive and can age well within the ecological constraints of the planet. This forum was one example based around the concept of community health, “a place-based, collective approach that promotes health and its determinants by, with, and for a geographically or culturally defined group, centering the community and its characteristics as an essential determinant of health for each member.” To learn more about the healthy cities roadmap for Lethbridge visit Active Lethbridge’s website at activelethbridge.ca

A renewal of public health post pandemic is a way for community participation to be incorporated into public health systems by sharing power, ensuring accountability, centering community self-determination through processes of engagement, coproduction, and governance.

Let’s build health that belongs to all of us.