142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

305613
Determining community wellbeing priorities through academia-public health linkages

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014

Lauren Wallar , Department of Population Medicine, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
Andrew Papadopoulos , Department of Population Medicine, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
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.

Learning Areas:

Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
List the eight Canadian Index of Wellbeing domains Describe how maximum difference scaling can be used to determine community wellbeing priorities Discuss the role of academia-public health linkages in determining community wellbeing priorities

Keyword(s): Well-Being, Partnerships

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the primary author and academic project lead responsible for study design, data analysis and interpretation, and results dissemination. As a PhD candidate, I am studying the role of academia-public health linkages in public health education and research.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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