Released today: Transforming Public Health – CIHR-IPPH’s strategic plan

Dear colleagues,

I am happy to share that the CIHR Institute of Population & Public Health’s (CIHR-IPPH) new strategic plan ‘Transforming Public Health’ was released today, coinciding with our CPHA plenary on Transforming Public Health in Canada. The process to create this plan began over a year ago with our 2021 Spring dialogue series, the results of which are summarized in our ‘Moving Forward Report’ released this past March.

Transforming Public Health is an evolution of our previous strategic plan – ‘The Future is Public Health’. It includes a continued commitment to Healthy Cities, an evolved perspective on Equity Science, a renewed focus on Global Public Health by helping to implement the CIHR Framework for Action on Global Health Research, and most notably, supports systems transformation through the addition of a fourth priority area – Public Health Systems.

This new strategic plan is a product of our time. While public health has come a long way in the two decades since the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2004, public health faces many challenges with the continued response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its long-term impacts, pervasive inequities like racism, colonialism, and ableism that permeate our society, as well as the climate change crisis which has countless consequences for population health.

IPPH is here to support Canada’s population and public health researchers, practitioners and policymakers as they rise to meet these challenges. This new strategic plan includes targeted actions to advance equity – including an equity plan that will be updated frequently for transparency – opportunities to address climate change through our Healthy Cities and Global Public Health priority areas, and support to reimagine and rebuild Canada’s public health systems through the addition of the Public Health Systems priority area.

Included in our planning process was an opportunity to take stock of the last five years of work. To that end, today we have also released our first-ever Impact Report titled ‘Public Health is the Future’ that measures our progress on our previous strategic plan ‘The Future is Public Health’ and illustrates how we have arrived at the renewed priorities in ‘Transforming Public Health’ that we launched today.

I encourage you to have a look at ‘Transforming Public Health’ so that you can see our new objectives and the actions we will take over the coming years to achieve impact, as well as ‘Public Health is the Future’ so you can see the full scope of our work over the last few years.

Much work has gone into the progress we have made and the development towards a vision for the future, not only from the IPPH team, but also from the population and public health community and our partners whose work, opinions, collaborations and advice have provided the foundation for these foundational documents. Thank you to everyone who contributed to our work over the past five years and making these efforts possible.

All of this new work is also now detailed on our website, which was updated today to reflect all that has happened since 2016. I hope that this new plan helps pave the way for transforming public health in Canada and achieve a brighter future for all.

Best,

Steven

Steven J. Hoffman JD PhD LLD | @shoffmania
CIHR Scientific Lead for Global Health
Scientific Director, CIHR Institute of Population & Public Health
Director, Global Strategy Lab, and
Professor of Global Health, Law, and Political Science, York University

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