Identifying leverage points for strengthening coordinated intersectoral action for health promotion in British Columbia

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

Health promotion (HP) enables people to increase control over health and reduce health inequities through action on the determinants of health. HP actions include developing personal skills, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, building healthy public policy, and reorienting health services to improve population health and wellness.The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for more coordinated, integrated and intersectoral HP action. The focus and value-add of the project is the development of co-created (with research, policy, and practice stakeholders) recommendations for enhanced HP and the innovative application of a complex systems approach to support this work. Using physical activity as a starting point, this project will to map (inventory) HP initiatives targeting physical activity at the provincial, regional, and local levels and identify areas to enhance coordination and integration to build healthier communities. The anticipated impacts and value of achieving this goal include:

• Shared leadership, governance, and accountability for HP.
• Increased collaborative capacity to align HP.
• Enhanced focus among stakeholders on reducing health equities.
• Shared resources (human, financial, infrastructure) to implement HP.
• Improved information (knowledge exchange, research and evaluation, monitoring and surveillance).
• Shared learning and understanding among stakeholders of new approaches to HP identified through the lens of a complex systems paradigm.

There are three objectives:

1. Describe and map existing physical activity HP initiatives and systems in BC.
2. Assess systems to identify facilitating and hindering factors and key feedback mechanisms that influence implementation, coordination and integration.
3. Strengthen systems through identification of priority leverage points and recommendations for more synergistic implementation of coordinated intersectoral HP in BC.

Source: CIHR Funding Decisions Database