What role for environmental public health practitioners in promoting healthy built environments?

Abstract

Spaces that encourage better health are increasingly seen as key to reducing the burden of chronic disease: many larger Canadian public health departments now include built environment (BE) teams, which work with municipalities and land use planners to promote and/or require the development of healthencouraging spaces. In many public health agencies, it is environmental health practitioners who have assumed the new healthy BE role, but at what cost to existing mandates? We argue that reinventing roles to increase BE capacities within environmental health practice would reinforce health protection mandates while building capacity in chronic disease prevention. Significant expansion into the design of healthier built environments may require some reallocation of resources. However, we anticipate that healthier built environments will reduce threats to health and so lessen the need for conventional health protection, while encouraging activities and behaviours that lead to greater population wellness.KEY WORDS: Built environment; chronic disease; environmental health; health hazards; public health practice La traduction du résumé se trouve à la fin de l'article.

Extreme heat and paediatric emergency department visits in Southwestern Ontario

“…Such evidence, however, is needed to monitor and understand national, provincial, and local across-time changes in the effects of extreme temperatures on paediatric health, as well as to inform local hospital and public health programs and policies that aim to mitigate adverse health effects. It is likely that ED preparedness and population-level prevention strategies aiming to address adverse environmental effects will produce more widespread and lasting improvements compared to individual prevention strategies (20). Thus, the objective of this study is to assess the association between extreme heat and daily ED visits among the paediatric population in Southwestern Ontario.…”