Towards the Best Possible Health and Wellbeing for Everyone

The Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) -- developed by Community Health Centres and the Association of Ontario Health Centres to help inform quality improvement while measuring impacts of programs and services on people AOHC members serve -- has been internationally recognized by Healthcare Informatics, a leading publication in the Health IT sector based in the United States.

In the months to come, we'll be bringing you stories that show the impacts health promotion and health equity programs have when they’re embedded in Comprehensive Primary Health Care.

Kofi Frempong is a Community Health Worker at Black Creek Community Health Centre (CHC) in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood. Frempong creates programs, like Freedom Fridayz and Dads Doing Hair, that aim to break down barriers for people who face anti-Black racism.

Happy New Year, Minister Hoskins! We hope it will be a healthy one, too. In fact, let’s resolve to make it the healthiest year yet for everyone living in Ontario. To help focus your efforts, we have taken the liberty of preparing nine New Year’s resolutions for you to take action on during 2017.

A few weeks ahead of Christmas in 2010, a group of women gathered for the first time, to share tea, knitting and sewing tips, and a bit of conversation. Six years later, the group is still going strong, welcoming women from the community to a safe space for creating beautiful things and making lasting friendships.

In the first week of December, the Patients First Act became law in Ontario. In the Act, “the promotion of health equity and development and implementation of health promotion strategies” is added to the mandate of Ontario’s 14 Local Health Integration Networks. To better imagine what this mandate could look like in action in primary health care, we’re bringing you stories about health promotion programs and health equity initiatives from AOHC member centres across the province.

Decades of colonialism and oppression have taken a terrible toll on the health and wellbeing of Indigenous people. Many struggle with depression and anxiety or suffer from chronic disease; in some communities, Type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions.

The latest Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) national report is a scathing indictment of our collective inability to address one of the greatest issues of our time – namely, the widening gap between the growth of the Gross Domestic Product and the wellbeing of everyday Canadians. In the span of just six years, this ‘health divide’ increased from 21 per cent in 2008 to more than 28 per cent in 2014.

CSC l'Estrie

On November 6th, 1986 Ontario’s provincial government enacted the French Language Services Act. The Act confers Francophones with the right to receive provincial government services delivered in French, notably in the 26 designated areas.

The Stairs, a Toronto-shot documentary that presents a raw and honest picture of harm reduction efforts in the city’s Regent Park neighbourhood, is screening now at the TIFF Lightbox.

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