This policy brief is an attempt to enrich public discourse and advance novel approaches to designing and implementing Niagara’s public-health policy agenda. The discussion embraces a holistic life-course perspective that is strategic in its orientation, and comprehensive in its scope with respect to the planning, delivery, and monitoring of health care. This promotion of wellness, prevention of illness, early identification of problems, and equitable access to services would require an integrated regional platform. The analytical lens of this life-course perspective serves to challenge Niagara’s institutional infrastructure to consider more synchronized and targeted approaches to addressing some of the perennial problems of public health in the region. Health and wellness is one of those cross-sectoral and transgenerational “wicked problems” that defy the departmental silos of conventional public policy platforms.

Authors: Sinéad McElhone and Diane Vanecko

Published By: Niagara Community Observatory at Brock University

Publication Date: April 2018

View The Future of Niagara’s Health Policy Brief