Connecting policy making, health care delivery, and population research to address early years health inequities in British Columbia

This Health System Impact Fellowship is co-funded by CIHR, Michael Smith Health Research BC, and the BC Ministry of Health (health system partner), to help build BC’s health policy research capacity for the integration of policy research into decision-making.

The early years are a critical time when physical and social development occurs. Children’s experiences during that period shape their behaviors, their learning capacity, and set their health, emotional, socioeconomic trajectories A recent report on the health and well-being of children in BC revealed profound disparities in sex, gender, geography, or data availability. The latter concerns population-level data and linked databases availability. Plus, the absence of a reproducible process to merge databases using a unique common identifier undermines the efforts to analyze and provide evidence for the wellbeing of children in BC.

This proposal seeks to explore a sustainable partnership-based model for connecting health population-level data to health care policymaking and health care delivery decision-making. The specific objectives are:

1. Build a co-produced partnership-based process for interconnecting health care policy, decision making, population health monitoring, research, and health care delivery.
2. Use a collaborative approach to identify critical questions and analyze relevant health policy, research, and practice priorities.
3. Support the development of a monitoring and surveillance system for healthy child development that follows key child development indicators over time.

This research program will formalize a strong partnership and a replicable process on data analysis between the BC Ministry of Health and the Human Early Learning Partnership, a School of Population and Public Health research unit. This process will also enable a monitoring and surveillance system of key indicators of the children’s health and wellbeing. Finally, this work will lay the foundations to create linked health and social databases from other ministries to inform policy and substantially reduce current disparities in BC.

Source: CIHR Funding Decisions Database