A recent trip to baseball’s legendary Fenway Park provided the ideal example of understanding systems and how they can create public health problems like obesity through structural means. Being aware of these systems, their boundaries, and their activities can help us better find the causes of individual activity by looking at what encourages behaviour not just what people do.
Systems and Design Thinking Go to the Ballpark Read More »
If design is everywhere humans are and shapes our interactions in the built environment, which dictates how we interact with the world around us should it not be considered important enough to be a part of public health? I recently picked up a copy of the architecturally-inspired Arcade Magazine because of its theme on Science,
Design Space in Public Health Read More »
When does common sense make little sense? How do we sense-make evidence when it seems to make little sense? The answers could lie in getting inside the heads of those we seek to influence and designing our communications for empathy and health. Evidence in public / health Last week there was a brief uproar in
Designing for Empathy and Health Read More »
Yesterday I posted on the story of Toronto Public Health tweeting a call for its followers to voice concerns to the TV show “The View” about the recent hiring of Jenny McCarthy, a prominent anti-vaccination advocate, as its new co-host. Today, Nicole Ghanie-Opondo reflects more deeply on what kind of impact such tweeting really has
Attack on Anti-vac – Toronto Public Health vs. Jenny McCarthy Read More »
If public health is important, should the presumably ‘top job’ in the field in a particular country not be highly coveted? Not if that position is tied to the government’s discretionary decision making. Andrea Hill looks the matter of replacing David Butler-Jones, Canada’s outgoing Chief Public Health Officer, and how there is a real risk
Low-profile public health job could mean best candidates won’t apply Read More »
How might we design health systems to promote health and wellbeing and not just treat illness and disease and manage infirmary and chronic conditions? What if health systems were about health? If we were to apply design thinking to health systems, what might be do? In a previous post, I suggested that knowledge translation is
Design (re)Thinking Health Systems Read More »
I recently spoke at an interactive workshop presentation at the 2013 Ontario Public Health Convention (TOPHC) looking at social media use in public health and the strategies available for evaluating those strategies in practice. The talk was focused on the tools, methods and approaches and the inherent challenges in dealing with a dynamic social communication
Evaluating Health Promotion Social Media Strategies for Public Health Impact Read More »
If a health scare manifested itself in the world and there were no journalists to cover the story, what would the impact on the public be? That is a question that lingered with me throughout the start of the 2013 Ontario Public Health Convention (TOPHC) which began with a morning dedicated to improving public health communication. Opening up
The Importance of Journalism to Public Health: 10 Years After SARS How Are We Doing? Read More »
A brilliant and comprehensive new book has been launched that brings together the best scholars working in the area of systems thinking and complexity and applying it to health. The book description can be found here along with a link to the abstract for a chapter I co-authored with Andrea Yip looking at the overlap
Handbook of Systems and Complexity in Health Read More »
Journalists occupy an important, yet often unacknowledged, role in the health system by providing a dispassionate account of the system’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to the public. It is through journalists that much of the research we scientists and practitioners produce gets communicated to the audiences likely to use them. This fourth estate is also
The Fourth Estate of Health and Medicine Read More »
