Webinar: Informing public health programs through engagement with communities that live with health inequities

This event took place in English.

Community engagement (CE) is an important step towards understanding the unique circumstances facing populations living with inequities. This is especially true when considering these communities’ opportunities and barriers to achieving health.

Having authentic and ongoing relationships with communities that experience marginalization – beyond one-time engagement events or client satisfaction – requires eliminating processes and practices that make decisions for those communities without their direct and meaningful involvement.

Community engagement (CE) skills

For public health practitioners, the skills, resources and tools for meaningful and participatory CE are beneficial for informing decision-making on actions to address health inequities.

This webinar explores CE as a strategy to reduce the marginalization of populations most impacted by health equities. Speakers reflect on the necessary shift from seeing the community as more than just a target audience for service delivery to drawing on them as a resource to inform public health priorities. It also explores practice-based examples, barriers to and opportunities for CE, ways to establish and maintain engagement with community members and stakeholders, and the importance of evaluating CE.

Listeners will learn about:

mechanisms to develop and support relationship-building and community engagement to address health inequities;
examples of short- and long-term practices to engage communities that experience inequities; and
strategies to increase community influence on public health program decision-making.

Speakers:


Dianne Oickle, Knowledge Translation Specialist, NCCDH	Heather Chase, Community Developer, Horizon Health Network	Nancy Stewart, Health Promoter, Public Health Services, Nova Scotia Health Authority

Related resources


Review summary: Community engagement to reduce inequalities in health (2015)	Public health speaks: Community engagement for health equity (2013)	A guide to community engagement frameworks for action on the social determinants of health and health equity (2013)

Leadership for health equity: Working intersectorally and engaging the community in Western Health (2014)	Fostering health through healing: engaging the community to create a poverty reduction strategy in Nunavut (2014)

Presenters:
Heather Chase, Nancy Stewart,
, M.Sc., B.Sc.

Spécialiste du transfert des connaissances

Dianne est diététiste et fait partie de l’équipe du CCNDS depuis 2014. Elle avait auparavant travaillé sur le terrain pendant 16 années, principalement en santé génésique et infantile auprès d’une clientèle diversifiée en milieu rural. Femme blanche cisgenre issue du peuple colonisateur, Dianne prône l’engagement indispensable des personnes vivant des iniquités au processus d’établissement des priorités de santé publique. Au CCNDS, ses fonctions concernent l’engagement communautaire, la promotion de la santé mentale, les pratiques intersectorielles, l’équité en santé publique environnementale, la création de mouvances et l’équité numérique. Dianne détient un baccalauréat ès sciences de l’Université St Francis Xavier et une maîtrise ès sciences de l’Université de la Saskatchewan.
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