Daniel T Myran et al. (2019) study gives us an excellent bird’s eye view of one aspect of Ontarians’ harmful use of alcohol: Their emergency room (ER) visits attributable to alcohol use. They have used administrative data available from 2003 to 2016: 13 years. The following are my key takeaways….

Simcoe Muskoka’s “HealthSTATS” is a treasure trove of evidence; however, I focus here only on one aspect of the harmful use of alcohol: “Hospital stays entirely caused by alcohol”. I chose this metric to make my arguments powerful and compelling to persuade readers to ask more questions and act. The…

Traditionally, public health practitioners focus on changing individual behaviour and lifestyles. Anyone can understand it easily by looking at public health messages. For example, think about this message: This was the dominant narrative in the 70s and 80s. Now, it has begun to change. People are asking this question: What…

“Alcohol is bad for health”. We read the above message on a portrait frame; The message narrows the reader’s focus to the human body. Under this narrative, we force readers to think about the illnesses that alcohol drinking may cause. This frame results in two unintended consequences: The industry invariably…

Three weeks before, I had to unlearn my learning about Maslow’s pyramid; it is not his. He did not build it to explain his theory about human motivation; “Maslow did not build a pyramid to explain his theory”. I read about it for the first time in a Scientific American…

It is obvious. The prevalence of diabetes and high blood pressure varies by neighbourhood in Toronto. The following maps from Ontario Community Health Profile Partnership (OCHPP) website display this geographical disparity. The maps use a colour scale; the darker the area higher the rate. We can find a clear geographical…

Look at Figure 1 Figure 1: Image source: http://www.sollis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/equity-vs-equality.jpg In Figure 1, all three children are of equal height. But, they cannot reach the fruits, Because of, the terrain’s unequalness. They need help. But, the help each one requires is different. They need boxes of different heights. By helping them…

Welcome to the world of effective communication for promoting public health and safety! In this blog post, we will explore the power of using plain language for crafting public health messages. By using simple and clear language in your messaging, we can ensure that, Whether you’re a public health professional…

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases through these links at no extra cost to you. The Montreal Protocol (#MontrealProtocol) is an upstream intervention #ClimateAction classic. It is a powerful climate treaty. It directly impacted global public health. The Protocol’s 35-year-long legendary journey…

On November 30, 2022, Action on Smoking and Health Canada unveiled the interactive global tobacco control progress hub. It is a very useful data visualization dashboard housed on the Tableau Public platform. This dashboard summarises all progress indicators of two global anti-tobacco campaigns: The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control…