Grant: Operating Grant: Prevention of Cardiovascular and Respiratory Diseases

High blood pressure is one of the most readily preventable causes of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke. Once diagnosed, management of hypertension requires ongoing monitoring. In order to make improvements in CVD within the community population entire communities need to be engaged in achieving program goals. Community organizations focused on health and well being need to form strong coalition efforts to generate an strong collaborative effort to address cardiovascular health promotion and prevention. This project aims to understand how different stages of coalition development within communities (formative, maintainance, and institutionalization stages) are associated with changes over time in individual health, population health and system-level outcomes within small and medium sized communities in Ontario. A modified time series analysis will be carried out incorporating agency and participants surveys as well as community level administrative data on cardiovascular outcomes will be gathered. The information gleaned will be important for health funders to provide for support for public health engagement into knowledge dissemination and will provide a template for further community participatory research approaches to chronic disease management and prevention.