The Ontario Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance (OCDPA), a coalition of more than 20 health-related organizations, has launched a multi-year initiative to capture, track and compare risk factors for chronic disease in Ontario. “Certain indicators can help track performance on health improvement,” says Dr. Norman Giesbrecht, Chair of the OCDPA Working Group that developed the report. “This framework will let us monitor short-, medium- and long-term changes and identify challenges to be addressed.”
This new framework gathers existing data on key risk factors, assembles it in one easy reference and provides a baseline for future measurement. Focusing on unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, tobacco use, high risk alcohol use, and mental illness, it will be a planning tool for government, as well as organizations, researchers and individuals involved in preventing chronic disease.
With help from the Canadian Mental Health Association Ontario, this is the first comprehensive Ontario-specific framework that consolidates and compares chronic disease risk factors across the province.
The full report, along with easy to share infographics for each of the risk factors can be found at www.ocdpa.ca.