Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

There is little to no relevant child health information available for Indigenous community health leaders in Ontario to use to support the health of children living within their communities. There is also a lack of research about how knowledge from public health assessments is used within Indigenous contexts and whether or not the process of how the public health assessment is created influences the community's use of the information that's generated. The Evaluation to Action: Integrating the Voices of Aboriginal children (ETA) is working to collaboratively create a public health performance measure (i.e. Child Health Report Card) to assess the health and wellbeing of Indigenous children and the environments in which they live and grow in partnership with several Indigenous community health leaders. This thesis proposes to qualitatively assess how implementability and impacts of developing a Child Health Report Card (CHRC) in full collaboration with Indigenous community health leaders, eliciting the perspectives of the Indigenous community health leaders who have joined the larger ETA effort. The current study will answer two research questions: (1) How does the community CHRC impact community dialogue, decisions, learning/understandings, and actions regarding Indigenous children's health; and (2) From the perspective of the Indigenous community health leaders, what features of the CHRC impact the implementation of its findings? Individual interviews and tailored focus groups will be used to gather data with participating Indigenous community leaders. Interpretive thematic analysis of the information shared will be used to analyze the results from both the interviews and tailored focus groups. Collaboration will be sought throughout all aspects of the study to ensure appropriateness and accuracy of the analyses and learned lessons. Study results will go to improve development of the CHRCs to occur next year, and is expected to help guide future reports of all types.