This meeting of the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Board of Health will cover a lot of administrative ground. The board will get reports about the year-end financials, how their using new tech tools, and some quarterly and annual updates. Also, we will hear about the still relevant struggle to keep cigarettes and their modern equivalent out of the hands of youth, not to mention some of the other health issues youth are facing. Let’s preview!
NOTE #1: This meeting will held in-person at Public Health’s office on Chancellors Way and 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 May 7 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:
Clearing the Air: Protecting Youth From the Harms of Tobacco and Vaping – See report below.
Innovative Public Health with AI and Automation – See report below.
KPMG Audit Findings Report – Presented under Finance + Audit Committee
Health Protection 2025 First Quarter Performance Indicator Summary – Presented for information, these are the stats from the first quarter of 2023 covering all the inspections that Public Health did over the first three months of the year, from the regular food safety inspection schedule to infection and communicable disease prevention and control.
Clearing the Air: Protecting Youth From the Harms of Tobacco and Vaping – In terms of good news, Public Health seized about one-fifth the number of illegal tobacco and vape products in 2024 compared to 2023, but there was also a 23 per cent increase in complaints and service requests, and most of those were related to sales of product to minors. Around 40 per cent of the complaints were about smoking or vaping incidents on school property, which is why Public Health is going to be prioritising youth test shoppers and increasing student education about the dangers of tobacco use.
Innovative Public Health with AI and Automation – Sure to be controversial, this report outlines five programs at Public Health that use A.I. and/or automation, some are in active use and some are being test driven. One example is using A.I. to process vaccine records, which come into Public Health by the hundreds and in all different formats making them difficult to organise and input by human hands. Other examples are the generation of immunisation notices and measles risk letters, processing reportable disease lab results (which still paradoxically arrive at Public Health via fax), and helping to manage public inquiries after hours and during busy times.
Online Prenatal and New Parent Program – This is an online eduction program run by Public Health meant to promote maternal mental health, increase preparedness for birth and childcare, discuss parent-baby bonding, and more. Public Health began to actively promote the program last year and saw a 91 per cent increase in registrations, and they put a special focus on promoting it among individuals under the age 25. Next, Public Health will stay the course and build on 2024’s success to get more people involved, especially among the younger demographics.
Children’s Health: Reducing Risk Factors and Building Resiliency – This report outlines some of the factors that are affecting youth mental health, and how they can build resiliency better in order to achieve improvements. At issue are some of the factors you might already be thinking about; those with a stable home life, family support, economic security, a caring school environment, and good sleep habits are more resilient than their peers who are missing some or most of those factors. The results of this research will be used to develop new programs to help knock down barriers and create more health equity in the community.
Corporate Communications Annual Report 2024 – It’s time for the annual look back at how well the agency communicated in the previous year, and it looks like comms had a pretty good run. In 2024, Public Health added accounts on Threads, BlueSky and Snapchat, they posted 103 videos on their Instagram feed, and began looking at how A.I. can help increase engagement and outreach to the community. In the process they increased impressions 33 per cent while the main Public Health website had over 555,000 hits in the last year.
Committee Reports: Finance + Audit Committee
2024 Draft Audited Financials – If summer is almost here, then so are the audited financial statements for the last fiscal year. The independent auditor finds that Public Health’s financial statements were presented fairly and that its operations and cash flow were in accordance with Canadian public sector accounting standards.
Compliance Report: Stewardship of Management Operations – One of the compliance reports for the provincial government that Public Health has to prepare every year is an overview of the policy work they’ve done. All policies and procedures are reviewed at least once every three years, but in 2024 only the “Business-Related Travel and Kilometre Expense Claims” was fully reviewed and updated.
Guelph Politico 