As usual, the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Board of Health is getting a late start to the year, and for their first meeting of 2025 they will get themselves sorted before they get this month’s public health concerns sorted. The Board will play musical chairs, and then they will dig into quarterly and annual reports that will address the current health condition in the region and the current status of some of your favourite diseases(!).
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 February 5 at 11 am.
NOTE #2: The meeting begins at 2 pm.
2025 Inaugural Meeting Elections and Nominations – Since this is the first Board of Health meeting this year, and since we’re a little more than halfway through the term, the Board of Health will reset the chair, and the vice-chair, and all the executive and committee positions, to start this meeting.
PRESENTATIONS:
There are three presentations: Addressing Priority Populations, Environmental Health and Infection Control Client Feedback Survey, and 2024 Trends in Diseases of Public Significance in WDG. Get the lowdown on what will be in these presentations in the reports below.
Health Protection 2024 Q4 Summary Report – This is the compiled annual results for all the Check Before You Choose programs including food safety, water safety and pest control. You can see the numbers here.
Clinical Services Annual Review – You may be interested to know that the rate of Gonorrhea and Hepatitis C remained pretty much much the same in 2024 even though it’s worth noting that the region was below the provincial rate of Hep C. There was also a slight increase in the number of Syphilis cases while public health successfully treated all eight new active cases of Tuberculosis last year. The report also notes that public health has started distributing at-home testing kits for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) through a partnership with GetAKit.
2024 Q3 and Q4 Dental Program Summary – This report encompasses two different programs, the Ontario Seniors Dental Care Program and Health Smiles Ontario, which is geared to children under 18. While there were fewer emergency referrals for the seniors due to access through the Canadian Dental Care Plan, there were mostly small changes in some treatments under Healthy Smiles, but with kids now being eligible for the CDCP there will likely be fewer kids accessing the service. Public health will be monitoring the numbers through 2025.
Addressing Priority Populations – When the Ontario Health Teams were launched they chose six priority populations to assist with immediate effect: people with Diabetes, people with lung disease, people needing end of life care, people who’ve had heart issues, mental health and additions, and the frail elderly population. The aim is to prevent the health of people in these groups from deteriorating further, and to focus on prevention and treatment where possible to mitigate long-term negative health outcomes. As this report details, some of the issues here are social determinants of health like food insecurity or access to primary care, and the hope is that public health might be able to use the data to better tailor programs to have a bigger impact for vulnerable people.
Environmental Health and Infection Control Client Feedback Survey – Last year, public health staff sent a survey to 52 different groups to learn if there’s anything they can do to improve their service or programs. They got 11 responses back, which is a 21 per cent response rate, and they were “overwhelmingly positive” with no opportunities for improvement identified. Having said that, staff say that they will keep looking for new ways to access people and stay on top of future issues that might change that point of view.
Trends in Diseases of Public Health Significance – This report identifies five diseases in particular: Salmonella, Pertussis, Giardia, Lyme disease, and Shigella, and guess what? They were all showing a “marked increase” in infections in 2024. That’s concerning on its own, but it’s also concerning that this region is running ahead of the provincial averages in all cases except Lyme disease where Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph is running at about 50 per cent of the Ontario average. According to the report, the reasons why Samonella, Giardia and Shigella cases are on the increase is currently unknown.
CLOSED SESSION:
The board will receive the Corporate Services Update from David Kingma, who is the VP of Human Resources and Corporate Services. Since this is a “personal matters about an identifiable individual, including employees, and the security of the property of the BOH” it will be discussed in closed session.
Guelph Politico 