Population Health in Canada: A Working Paper

III. Methodology

Two major strategies were employed in compiling the background documents, papers and reports for this discussion paper. First, the Institute of Health Promotion Research compiled documents provided by Health Canada and members of Provincial and Territorial Ministries of Health. These documents detail attempts by these and other organizations to incorporate a population health perspective into policy, either through the setting of health goals or through the creation and implementation of actual policies.

An E-mail request was sent to members of the Federal/ Provincial/ Territorial Advisory Committee on Population Health, the Working Group on the Report on the Health of Canadians, the Working Group on Intersectoral Action for Population Health and the Working Group on Public Health. This request described the National Conference on Shared Responsibility for Health and Social Impact Assessments and its intent, our proposed synthesis paper and the type of documents required for the project. Individuals were asked whether they could provide relevant documents and/or suggest further potential sources of information. A follow-up E-mail was sent two weeks later. From these sources, we obtained references to several books and journal articles, summaries of population health research in Canada and Canadian policy documents that incorporate important aspects of the population health perspective.

Due to time and resource restrictions we did not attempt a comprehensive view of health policies in Canada, but, instead, collated available documents to create a snapshot of population health activity. This snapshot is intended to identify issues that require dialogue and collaboration among diverse sectors of both government and society.

Second, we conducted a review of the published literature to obtain government reports, books and journal articles describing and critiquing the population health perspective. Given that the field of population health is still quite new, searches on key words were somewhat problematic. The following databases and the Internet were searched: MEDLINE, Psychological Abstracts, Nursing Abstracts, ERIC, CINAHL (Allied Health Disciplines), HEALTH (Health Policy) and SOCIOFILE (Sociological Abstracts), HealthStar, and Current Contents. We combined terms related to population health and the determinants of health.

In conversation with colleagues, and utilizing our own past experience with the population health movement, we identified several additional key texts to include in synthesis. With these we obtained additional confidence that the documents reviewed for this discussion paper provide a current perspective on key aspects of the population health movement in Canada.

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