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Community Health Mapping to Reduce Health Disparities

The key goal of this project was to build capacity of community health centres (CHCs) in developing and utilizing community mapping tools for evidence-based service planning and advocacy work geared at reducing local health disparities.

Project Activities

The project included training in simple, user-defined maps as well as multi-criteria decision- making maps (using a tool called CommonGIS).

With technical support from Dr. Claus Rinner and students from the Department of Geography at Ryerson University, (Igor Dragovic and Jacqueline Young) the CHC partners created dozens of maps for their catchment areas. The maps helped to answer questions such as: Where do the majority of our refugee clients live? Which groups are concentrated in low income neighbourhoods? Are there neighbourhood clusters of people with access barriers who we are missing in our services and outreach strategies?

Access Alliance created maps data showing age and language data. The maps were used to plan outreach for pilot-testing a health education program for newcomer youth. Other maps were used to engage community partners in planning outreach to Tamil, Mandarin, Urdu and Bengali-speaking communities as part of a migration and diabetes research project.

Also, the Community Health Centre partners identified ways that the GIS mapping tools could be made easier to use for evidence-based planning.

Reports

Community Health Mapping to Investigate Health Disparities among Neighbourhoods in Toronto (2009) pdf, 95kb
Poster presented at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing Research Day, June 24, 2009, Ryerson University.

Key Partners and Collaborators

Co-Investigators:

  • Claus Rinner, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University, Department of Geography

Community/Policy Collaborators:

  • Black Creek Community Health Centre
  • The Four Villages Community Health Centre
  • Regent Park Community Health Centre
  • Women’s Health in Women’s Hands Community Health Centre

Funder

The Centre for Urban Health Initiatives provided a seed grant for this pilot project.

For more information please contact:

Dianne Patychuk, Project Coordinator
stepstoequity@gmail.com

Andrew Koch, Data Support and Evaluation Coordinator
(416) 324-0927 ext. 321
research@accessalliance.ca