Grant: Project Grant

Most First Nations, Inuit, and Metis (FNIM) peoples live in urban areas. Our relatives in cities are hidden in, or excluded from, the health information systems that are used to plan and track health and public health services. These failures drive persistent health inequities for First Peoples as there is no way to accurately understand unmet health needs nor whether existing services are helping address these gaps. For 15 years, the Well Living House research team has worked in partnership with Indigenous health centres in seven Canadian cities to address these issues. Together we have created the largest by community, for community urban Indigenous health information dataset in Canada, known as Our Health Counts (OHC). This research project will support the continuation and progression of this work. Specifically, it will support: 1. The creation of an Indigenous Knowledge Trust to govern, manage, and optimize OHC datasets, linked tools and resources; 2. The ongoing production of otherwise unavailable health information to address data gaps in Indigenous community defined key priority areas (i.e., emergency room use and real-time hospitalization; infectious disease rates; mental health and substance use outcomes over time) through linkage of OHC data to provincial data holdings, and linkage of patient rosters and selected EMR data to GEMINI holdings; 3. Facilitated sharing of the new health information with: a. health care providers and Indigenous community at the Indigenous health centres using customized data dashboards and b. key policy makers and their networks via quarterly knowledge-to-policy forums; 4. Growth of the FNIM health sciences workforce by supporting the first cohort of FNIM graduates from the Indigenist Epidemiology and Data Science Certificate program, composed of Indigenous data science coursework and a tailored immersive work placement within an Indigenous health centre.