Grant: Project Grant

A growing number of local governments in Canada are having all of their departments - such as health, housing, education, and transportation - working together to improve the conditions for health in their communities. These governments are trying what has been called "Health in All Policies" (HiAP). HiAP works best when federal, provincial/territorial, and local governments work together to develop healthy policies. But there is little evidence to support the use of HiAP. This team includes academic researchers working closely with people using HiAP in local governments across Quebec and Ontario. Our goal is to create knowledge that directly supports people in government in using HiAP. We will use a series of case studies to examine the causes of positive and negative experiences with using HiAP, while trying to understand how provincial governments can effectively support HiAP at the local level. We will conduct around six case studies - three in each province - and our data will include 16 interviews with politicians, civil servants from health and non-health sectors, and non-governmental partners working on HiAP locally. We will also analyze documents describing HiAP experiences in case settings that we obtain from government (e.g., meeting minutes), academic journals, and other sources. To ensure that our findings help support improvements to the use of HiAP locally, we will work with our policymaker partners to: (1) host a regular meeting with knowledge users to facilitate on-going discussion on how to improve HiAP efforts; (2) writing and sharing a series of policy briefs that describe our findings about each case in plain language; and (3) designing and hosting a series of workshops in each case setting to discuss our findings and what they mean for improving the use of HiAP locally. Later, we will check whether or not and why these three steps had any impact on the use of HiAP in case settings.