National Collaborating Centre receives funding renewal for five years.
July 15, 2010. The National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy’s (NCCHPP’s) contribution agreement with the Public Health Agency of Canada has been renewed for an additional five-year period.
Created in 2006, the Centre’s mandate is to make existing research more accessible to practitioners, to build networks, and to identify research gaps in the development of healthy public policies.
Based in Montréal and Québec City, the Centre is hosted by the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), a centre of expertise and reference in public health. According to Dr. Luc Boileau, the INSPQ’s Chief Executive Officer, the collaboration with the NCCHPP has been very beneficial. “Among other things, we have brought the stability of our infrastructure, our scientific expertise and our integration within the Québec context, while the Centre’s pan-Canadian mandate has increased our connectedness to other networks across the country. The Centre has also developed a specialized expertise in healthy public policy. We are quite pleased with the results so far.”
The Centre’s Lead, François Benoit, says that the announcement of stable funding for five years is welcome news. “We have several innovative projects off the ground now, including work in deliberative processes, public health ethics, and health inequalities, to name a few, as well as some mature projects such as our work on Health Impact Assessment. We are looking forward to developing these and others more fully over the coming five years.”
Healthy public policies are those policies outside of the health sector that still influence public health. For example, policies related to housing, education, transportation and other areas are influential in determining the health of the population. Poverty and income are profoundly influential in determining health status. Policies linked to these issues are also embedded in a host of other social considerations, and it is a particular interest of the NCCHPP that such policies are considered from a public health perspective as well as a policy perspective.
Benoit says that a key goal for the next years is to scale up existing projects, particularly by developing partnerships with other organizations. Another goal is to refine work that was developed for a broader audience in order to produce workshops, documents and training tailored to the interests of specific groups. “We have ongoing dialogues with medical officers of health, as well as with public health nurses and a host of other groups. Each is situated differently and each acts within the system accordingly. Our challenge is to develop work that ‘clicks’ for different sectors so that people will say ‘that is what I have been looking for.’”
The NCCHPP is one of six National Collaborating Centres funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Each centre is situated in a different region of Canada and each focuses on a specific area of public health interest.