Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada-Research Policy and Practice最新文献

Introduction: Few studies have analyzed the impact of public investments in indoor and outdoor recreational spaces, and even fewer have assessed this impact longitudinally. This hinders informed decision-making about returns on investments made with limited public budgets. We assessed the impact of a 2008 municipal plan to revitalize existing urban and rural public indoor facilities and outdoor spaces by evaluating changes in usage levels before and after implementation of Phase 1 (2009-2013) of the revitalization plan.

Methods: A quasi-experimental study involving a telephone survey of 750 participants was conducted before and after Phase 1. A region with similar demographics and public recreational indoor and outdoor infrastructure was used for comparison.

Results: Our analysis found no changes in usage of recreational venues over time whether indoor (e.g. multipurpose recreational facilities, community halls) or outdoor (e.g. golf courses, off-leash dog parks, multiuse trails), in either the intervention or comparison region. Only one rural multipurpose indoor recreational facility showed a statistically significant increase in usage during Phase 1.

Conclusion: Strategies targeting only physical infrastructure may not result in increased usage across a municipal population. To address existing inequities in access to publicly funded community resources that support health, both the built and social environments must be considered.

Introduction: The built environment supports physical activity (PA) by providing opportunities to be active in daily life. Natural experiments are valuable for assessing how real-world changes to the built environment affect PA and are critical for guiding policies to improve population-level PA. The objective of this review was to summarize the evidence from natural experiments that investigated the impacts of built environment changes on PA in Canada.

Methods: Searches were conducted in MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, ProQuest Public Health and SportDISCUS, from inception to 27 November 2024. Natural experiment evaluations that included a comparator or historical control group and assessed changes in PA associated with changes in the built environment were eligible. A narrative synthesis summarizes the evidence and the certainty of the evidence.

Results: Results from the included natural experiments (n = 25) suggest positive effects, with low to moderate certainty, of increased walkability, new cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, bike share (bike rental) programs and new trails. However, there was very low to low certainty of no significant effects for bus rapid transit, school building and yard improvements and school zone improvements. Some evidence suggests negative effects of off-leash dog park areas on children's park-based PA and of daycare yard improvements on moderate-to-vigorous intensity PA.

Conclusion: Few Canadian studies have evaluated the impact of built environment changes on PA, with most emerging in the last decade. Future studies should include larger and more diverse samples and all regions, control for confounders including seasonal variation in outdoor PA, use well-matched control groups and incorporate objective PA measures.

Introduction: Built environment initiatives that change the physical places in which people live, work and play offer an approach to preventing cancer and chronic diseases. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Alberta Healthy Communities Approach Phase II (AHCA II), a community-based approach to creating healthy environments within and across rural communities and addressing modifiable health behaviours to prevent and reduce cancer and chronic disease.

Methods: Nineteen rural communities participated in AHCA II. Data collected with and by community members included two pre- and postimplementation assessment tools and postimplementation focus groups and surveys. Qualitative and quantitative data sources were triangulated to determine community-level outcomes and impacts.

Results: The evaluation found three key outcomes and impacts of the AHCA: supportive (built) environments for health; community wellness culture; and community capacity. These intersecting categories demonstrate the positive effects of healthy community initiatives on improving the built environment and supporting health behaviours such as healthy eating, physical activity, ultraviolet radiation protection and tobacco reduction.

Conclusion: In addition to improving supportive environments for health, the AHCA facilitated cultural changes and improved community capacity within and across rural communities in Alberta. Each of these components is required to support long-term behaviour changes that promote health and prevent cancer and chronic disease. While these results are encouraging, time and additional evaluations are required to determine whether behavioural changes are sustained and result in reduced rates of cancer and chronic disease.

This study presents the first Canadian self-reported estimates of child maltreatment (CM) from youth using data from 5256 participants aged 15 to 17 years in the 2023 Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth. CM prevalence was high, particularly for emotional abuse (44.9%) and exposure to caregiver emotional intimate partner violence (39.4%). Females reported higher prevalence of sexual abuse (8.1% vs. 1.5%) and emotional abuse (52.2% vs. 35.4%) than males. Youth identifying as nonbinary or with a gender different from their sex assigned at birth reported the highest prevalence across all CM types, including 22.4% for sexual abuse and 83.7% for emotional abuse. These finding underscore the need for targeted research and policies that address structural determinants of gender-based disparities.

This corrigendum is being published to add a clarification on page 361 of the following article: Gariépy G, Prowse RKM, Plouffe R, Graham E. Supervised consumption sites and population-level overdose mortality: a systematic review of recent evidence, 2016-2024. Health Promot Chronic Dis Prev Can. 2025;45(9):357-66. https://doi.org/10.24095/hpcdp.45.9.02 Text has been added to highlight an important precision about the Rammohan et al. study. Bold has been used to identify the added text. The authors thank Dr. Daniel Werb for raising this concern.

Introduction: This study examined physical activity (PA) levels among youth (12-17 years) and adults (18 years and older) living in Canada by subgroups including gender, sexual orientation, population groups, education, and income.

Methods: Data from the 2021 Canadian Community Health Survey (N = 44 239), a large national, cross-sectional survey, was used to examine self-reported daily PA time spent in active transportation, recreation, school/camp, occupational/household, and adherence to PA recommendations (≥ 60 minutes/day and ≥ 150 minutes/week of moderate-to-vigorous intensity PA for youth and adults, respectively) by population subgroups. Significant differences within subgroups were assessed with chi-square and Tukey-Kramer analyses.

Results: Among youth, boys were more likely to meet the PA recommendation than girls (54.9% vs. 36.5%). Boys engaged in more recreational (36.0 vs. 24.0 min/day) and school/camp (24.0 vs. 15.9 min/day) PA than girls. Youth from households in the highest income quintile reported more recreational PA compared to those in the lowest income quintile (35.8 vs. 22.1 min/day). Among adults, there was a significant gender difference in PA recommendation adherence (men: 57.4% vs. women: 51.7%). Men engaged in more recreational (18.0 vs. 15.1 min/day) and occupational/household (26.4 vs. 15.4 min/day) PA than women. Recreational PA was significantly higher in households with the highest income (22.8 min/day) and education (17.4 min/day) compared to lowest income (10.4 min/day) and education (6.9 min/day), respectively. Few sub-group differences were observed for active transportation.

Conclusion: PA inequalities persist in Canada. Future research should explore why these inequalities exist to help inform interventions.

The Government of Canada has released an updated version of Provincial and Territorial Child Protection Legislation and Policy, which offers a comprehensive overview of child protection laws across the country. Developed collaboratively by the Department of Justice Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), the report highlights legislative changes from 2018 to 2023, with an added focus on Indigenous laws and information sharing for research or statistical purposes.

A gap in Canadian public health surveillance is the monitoring of childhood positive mental health (PMH). We used available data from the first six cycles of the Canadian Health Measures Survey to examine how two potential PMH indicators are distributed across time and populations of children aged 6 to 11 years. The prevalence of normative parent-rated prosocial behaviour and perceived happiness was high and relatively stable across time. Normative parent-rated prosocial behaviour was more common among females (vs. males) and 8- to 9-year-olds (vs. 6- to 7-year-olds), while perceived happiness was higher among 6- to 7-year-olds (vs. 10- to 11-year-olds).