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Our Voice in Action |
Here is a list of OPHA's most recent public health advocacy initiatives. If you would like to join an OPHA workgroup or assist in some other way in any of OPHA's advocacy initiatives please contact our Communications & Public Relations Officer.
Welcome Minister Kaplan
OPHA has sent a letter welcoming Minister Kaplan to the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. In addition to expressing our commitment to supporting his efforts to advance the Liberal government’s efforts on such issues as social determinants of health and the launch of the new Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, we took the opportunity to advocate for the implementation of the Capacity Review Committee report as well as the appointment of a Chief Medical Officer Health for the province as matters of urgency.
OPHA-alPHa Working Group on Social Determinants of Health
The newly formed OPHA-alPHa Working Group on Social Determinants of Health has sent a letter to the Honourable Deb Matthews, Minister of Children and Youth Services supporting her efforts to date in her role as Chair of the government's Anti-Poverty Cabinet Committee. The letter reiterated OPHA's previous calls to revise the Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program rates to reflect actual living costs, and the annual indexing of the minimum wage to reflect inflation. In support of the government's poverty monitoring strategy, OPHA called for the use of three concrete indicators in the measurement of poverty — a market basket measure of absolute poverty, a relative measure of poverty over time and across jurisdictions, and a deprivation index to display actual poverty that is sometimes masked by averages.
OPHA Responds to The Leitch Report
OPHA has sent a letter to the federal Minister of Health, The Honourable Tony Clement, commenting on various aspects of the report submitted to Health Canada by Dr. Kellie Leitch, "Reaching for the Top: A Report by the Advisor on Healthy Children and Youth". The letter was generally supportive of the findings and recommendations. However, OPHA called for an extension of the report so that issues such as breastfeeding, social determinants of health, and parent and child development, which were either omitted or underemphasized in the document, could be more fully explored from a public health or preventive medicine perspective.
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