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Our Voice in Action

Access, Equity and Social Justice Workgroup

The Access, Equity and Social Justice Workgroup had a very productive 2007 year. Our mission to enhance awareness of health inequities and diversity issues and assist with building the public health sectors' capacity to address them, led us in two main directions:

• toward developing tools to assist with diversity competence building, and
• ensuring a greater presence of these issues in the creation of the new mandates for the health units.

To this end we have worked on a variety of projects and events this year. Some of the highlights of this group's activities included:

• writing and submitting an advocacy paper that argued for the inclusion of surveillance and assessment of health inequities in the new Ontario Public Health Standards and Protocols;
• providing input to the new draft standards and proposed protocols;
• drafting a Learning Outline for the Diversity Competent Public Health Professionals; and
• developing an annotated bibliography on resources on Access, Equity and Social Justice.

We have also obtained initial feedback on the draft Learning Outline from the health units that attended the workshop we organized during the 2007 OPHA conference.

This year we have joined the newly formed OPHA-alPHa work group on Determinants of Health and with this group, we jointly organized a post-conference workshop that featured exemplary methods of assessing health inequities and a discussion on policy advocacy directions in relation to poverty reduction and inclusion.