Updated on September 20, 2024 I created the following asset map using the Google My Maps tool, which is free. My project was to create a map of the designated stroke centres in Ontario. These centres can remove a brain blood clot that results in a stroke. Strokes are medical emergencies. If a patient suspected of a stroke reaches those centres in time, surgeons can prevent/minimise permanent brain damage. Here are the steps I followed. Step 1: Data collection I created an Excel sheet of the designated stroke centres. I obtained the hospital names from this publicly available source: Cor…

Asset mapping strategy benefits health promoters, resource and patient care navigators. It helps us, Of course, it also helps us to identify gaps. Overall, the strategy helps us visualize a more realistic picture of our community. Asset mapping should be an integral part of social determinants of health projects. What do we mean by community assets? According to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, community assets include “anything that improves the quality of community life”. Community assets are “anything that improves the quality of community life”. UCLA Center for Health Policy Research We can group community assets in many…

COVID 19 vaccine hesitancy is real. It hurts. With Omicron, vaccine hesitancy has become a major roadblock. The problem has gone viral very much like the COVID19 spread. What is COVID 19 vaccine hesitancy? Vaccine hesitancy refers to situations when someone either refuses or delay getting the CVODI19 vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy is not new; it has been there for all vaccines. However, we are discussing this again with this COVID19 pandemic. We have many resources to learn more about it. The latest addition is the Coursera course. It is free. This post dives into this excellent resource. About the course…

A group of Isreal researchers have documented hospital admissions due to COVID-19. They have compared the patients’ vaccine status and found that majority did not have the third dose. Following is the graph from their research paper published on The Lancet, October 29, 2021. Following is the link to the full paper: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02249-2/fulltext Go for the third dose.

Evidence is growing that COVID-19 can transmit through the air. Need evidence?  Julian W Tang et al.’s BMJ article dissects the evidence. Furthermore, governments are changing their health education messages accordingly. In this video clip, the Canadian government are now promoting adequate ventilation as a method of reducing transmission. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZjTT4nrWu4&t=24s

The upstream-downstream metaphor helps public health practitioners to choose cost-effective public health interventions. This post curates a set of peer-reviewed articles that deal with the upstream-downstream” metaphor. 1. The upstream versus downstream metaphor to reduce health inequalities In this article, Naoimh, E. McMahon reviews published literature until June 2020 to find how the upstream-downstream metaphor has helped us frame action to reduce health inequalities. The full text is available for free. Link to the article: https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pubmed/fdab157/6288548 In her previous article published in the Critical Public Health Journal, she describes how English researchers interpret the “upstream-downstream” parable. In Naoimh’s two blog…

Those who know public health know Prof. Irving Zola‘s “upstream vs downstream” parable. Irving Zola is a medical sociologist. His friend, John McKinlay, describes Zola’s parable in his 2019 article, “A case for re-focusing upstream: The political economy of illness”1. The “Upstream boat” sails through this upstream path. Following is the reproduction of the parable; ” I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river, and I hear the cry of a drowning man. So, I jump into the river, put my arms around him, pull him to shore, and apply artificial respiration. When he begins to breathe,…

Think of a situation where you are automatically enrolled for organ donation when you obtain your vehicle license; however, you have the option to “opt-out”. This is a classic “opt-out” default option. Here, you are being nudged for organ donation. Its counterpart option is “opt-in”. In that situation, the default is that you are not in the program; you have to ask for it to enter into the organ donation program. “The opt-out default option makes life easy.” This seemingly simple change in the “choice architecture” has made a huge impact on behaviour change without any cost for its implementation….

Updated on March 12, 2023 The above image is a road safety nudge. The road arrows guide road users into two choices; either go straight or turn. We find those nudges all the time. The word, nudge, refers to “prodding (a gentle push) someone’s elbow to draw attention”. This post delves into nudging to understand heuristics and cognitive biases for better decision-making in the health sector. A brief history of the “nudge” theory The nudge theory’s roots date back to the early 1970s. That was when cognitive and social psychology research started to gain traction. It began with the influential…

The Swiss Cheese Model for COVID-19 is an excellent mental tool to visualize COVID-19 prevention strategies at the system level, a bird’s eye view. First, about the Swiss Cheese Model. As emphasized by James Reason, the model’s creator, it invites us to view human errors as a consequence, not as a cause. According to this line of thinking, the error is not a moral problem but a system problem. I have discussed it in the above post. Swiss Cheese Model for COVID-19 We can apply the Swiss Cheese Model for COVID-19 to visualize and understand COVID-19 prevention strategies. Academics and…