Get crunk with this month’s meeting of the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Board of Health meeting! …Not really. Seriously though, the community’s thoughts about using cannabis and the effects of using cannabis are on the agenda as a report based on survey conducted by Public Health is presented. In other news, the board will talk about the roll out of seasonal vaccines, and other communicable diseases that are going around.
NOTE #1: This meeting will held virtually online. To get the link you will have to send a request to join the meeting via an online form that you can find here. Deadline to send in the request is Wednesday March 6 at 11 am.
NOTE #2: The meeting begins at 2 pm.
MOH Update(s) – Medical Officer of Health Dr. Nicola Mercer will deliver her verbal report on current matters facing Public Health.
PRESENTATIONS:
Cannabis Survey – There’s a full report about this later in the agenda.
Vaccine Administration in LTC/RH’s – Public Health got a jump start on their vaccination campaign in area long-term care and retirement homes last fall and they saw some good results. The overall influenza vaccination rate for employees across all LTCH and RH in the
area was 71 per cent and 59 per cent, respectively while for residents the rates were 87 per cent and 90 per cent respectively. In terms of residents getting COVID-19 boosters last fall, it was 72 per cent and 71 per cent, which was a “considerable drop” from previous years and “vaccine fatigue” was the reason why along with the timing of a spring vaccination campaign. The 2024 campaign will include the RSV vaccine in addition to the flu and COVID-19 shots.
COVID Vaccinations – According to this report, “As of February 2, 2024, there have been over 360 hospitalizations in WDG of patients with COVID-19, and over 14,300 in Ontario for the current respiratory season.” Despite that, attendance at vaccine clinics was down 84 per cent this year, and the total number of vaccine doses handed out was down 65 per cent. Both of these figures are in-line with the provincial average.
WDGPH Annual Privacy Program Update – The number of privacy breaches at Public Health continued to go down in 2023 and are their lowest level since 2018 with only two, and neither of them constituted a major breach.
Cannabis Survey – Last year, Public Health conducted a community survey about cannabis attitudes and behaviours around the region, and there were some interesting results. There were almost 2,100 responses to the survey, and it should be noted that there were some serious knowledge gaps about the effects, which is risky because nearly a quarter of the respondents said that they’ve used cannabis more often since the pandemic. For instance, about 43 per cent of people didn’t know there can be delayed effects while eating edibles, over 1-in-3 said that they were unaware that youth have different levels of harm from cannabis than adults, and one-quarter said that they didn’t know cannabis use could harm a baby during pregnancy. Public Health is going to use the data collected to tailor education campaigns.
Dashboard and Reports Portal Overview 2024 – Last fall, Public Health released a revamped version of the various health dashboards, and the results have been very positive resulting in 23 times more traffic. Public feedback indicated that there’s still some work to be done to improve the user experience, specifically on the COVID-19 dashboard, but Public Health is planning to make improvements and add more dashboards in 2024.
Trends in Tuberculosis (TB) Management – So there was a “significant increase” in the number of TB infections last year, and while Canada has one of the lowest rates of TB on Earth, in this country the presence of the disease is more pronounced in immigrant and Indigenous populations in numbers that are disproportionate to the total population. The number of active infection in the region doubled between 2022 and 2023, from six to 12, and to help combat that trend, Public Health will be launching three projects to educate the public, increase monitoring and care and reduce stigma.
Trends in Diseases of Public Health Significance – There are about 71 different diseases that are monitored for “Public Health Significance”, and right now six of them showed an increase in the number of cases locally in 2023: invasive Group A streptococcal disease, pertussis (whooping cough), viral meningitis, shigellosis, amebiasis, and listeriosis. The increases in some of these diseases might be due to lower transmission rates seen during the pandemic, but there are still some questions about why amebiasis and shigellosis are showing higher numbers.
Finance + Audit Committee Report – This report breaks down the various sub-budgets at Public Health, meaning projects and programs covered by grants and other kinds of funding arrangements outside of model that covers the majority of their activities. You will be pleased to know that these budgets are balanced!
Correspondence – There’s one letter for the board’s consideration, and it’s from the Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington (KFL&A) Board of Health to the Minister of Health and Public Health Ontario. KFL&A Public Health is concerned about the proposed closure of the Public Health Ontario Laboratory in Kingston and the impacts on health monitoring without having laboratory facilities geographically close at hand. They’d like to have a conversation about it.
CLOSED SESSION:
There are two matters on the closed agenda, once involving “personal matters about an identifiable individual, including BOH employees, and the security of the property of the BOH” and another to receive an additional report from the Finance + Audit Committee as it’s a matter of “the security of the property of the BOH.”
Guelph Politico 