Determining community wellbeing priorities through academia-public health linkages

Public health and academia are united in their desire to improve community wellbeing albeit through different capacities. Community wellbeing represents a state in which all community members achieve the highest quality of life. It can be measured at the municipal level using a set of 26 indicators across 8 domains. In order to meet wellbeing needs, public health must marshal their limited resources in order to deliver select programs and services. Knowledge of community wellbeing priorities would improve resource allocation; however, priority measurement can be costly and time-consuming. To address this, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health collaborated with the University of Guelph to conduct a wellbeing prioritization exercise. The objective of this collaborative project was to determine the relative importance of the 26 wellbeing indicators by socioeconomic status in the City of Guelph. A maximum difference scaling survey instrument was created in which respondents were repeatedly asked to choose the “most important” and “least important” indicator from different indicator subsets. The survey instrument also collected postal code and demographic information. Surveys were distributed to 600 respondents in geographically diverse local public health clinics. Responses were analyzed using Hierarchical Bayes to determine importance scores for each wellbeing indicator. Postal codes were used to map socioeconomic status by geographic location using Statistics Canada Census analytical tools. Final survey results are anticipated to elucidate community wellbeing priorities by socioeconomic status, and ultimately aid local public health planning and delivery of targeted community programs and services.