Poverty isn’t just material deprivation – lack of money, lack of housing, lack of food. The Salvation Army’s new Dignity Project underlines the “dehumanizing scourge of poverty and injustice” and has launched a powerful education campaign to let the public know “what it means to live in poverty” and “what they can do to help”. […]
Health systems and Health equity
Ontario set to unveil new partnership strategy for vital non-profit sector; moving from 19th century charity to 21st century social innovation
Ontario Citizenship Minister Eric Hoskins is set to unveil the province’s partnership strategy with the vital non-profit sector on Thursday, along with Helen Burstyn of the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Ontario’s non-profits include 45,000 organizations and employ more than one million people – 15% of the province’s workforce. Non-profits contribute $50 billion to the provincial economy – […]
Driving health equity into action: Bob Gardner at Ryerson Conference
Policy makers, community partners, scholars, and students explored the challenges and issues surrounding a more equitable Canada last Saturday. The Wellesley Institute’s Bob Gardner gave a keynote speech arguing that health equity can be realized, and outlined a roadmap with the strategies, tools, policy changes and community mobilization needed to make it happen.
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Wellesley Institute staffers at CivicAction Summit: Analyzing critical issues, networking for action
Wellesley Institute staffers Rick Blickstead, Sheila Block and Michael Shapcott joined hundreds of other leaders from across the Greater Toronto Region for the CivicAction 2011 Greater Toronto Summit on Thursday. They’ll be back again for day two on Friday. Thursday was a day of high-level analysis, on-the-ground focus and – perhaps most importantly – an incredible […]
Mental Well-Being Impact Assessment: A Primer
To drive health equity into action we need to understand the needs of health disadvantaged populations, identify barriers to equitable access to quality care, and build equity into priority setting, resource allocation and performance management. We need effective and useable equity-focused planning tools. One problem with the way health impact assessment has evolved is that […]
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Health Promotion Through An Equity Lens
Health promotion is crucial to keeping people well and preventing illness. A major challenge is that many health promotion programs are focused on individual behaviour and do not take peoples’ unequal conditions and opportunities into account. As a result, they are not effective for vulnerable and marginalized communities, and can actually make disparities worse if […]
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Health Equity Impact Assessment: A Primer
To drive health equity into action we need to understand the needs of health disadvantaged populations, identify barriers to equitable access to quality care, and build equity into priority setting, resource allocation and performance management. Health Equity Impact Assessment is a practical and effective planning tool that analyzes the potential impact of service, program or […]
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Three Wellesley Institute reps join CivicAction Summit to help build healthy, equitable GTA
The Wellesley Institute’s Rick Blickstead, Sheila Block and Michael Shapcott will join community and business leaders and politicians from across the Greater Toronto Area for the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance Summit on Thursday and Friday. The Wellesley Institute is committed to working towards a healthy and equitable GTA, and we have a special interest and […]
Celebrating 100 years since the founding of the Wellesley Hospital
In 1911, when Dr Herbert Bruce founded the Wellesley Hospital, Toronto was a city teeming with immigrants. Many of the new arrivals lived in substandard housing, lived on low incomes and suffered poor health. Fast forward to Toronto of 2011, a city that celebrates its cultural diversity, yet many recent immigrants still suffer higher rates […]
Continue ReadingCelebrating 100 years since the founding of the Wellesley Hospital
What Is Health Equity?
Health equity is deep in the DNA of the Wellesley Institute. Many health statistics report averages over a large population – the entire City of Toronto or even the whole country of Canada. But averages can obscure the reality that certain groups (such as poor people, or recent immigrants, or Aboriginal people) bear the heaviest […]