A renewed partnership between Ottawa Public Health and the Champlain Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Network promises to implement a “bigger and better” approach to preventing heart disease in the Ottawa area, say officials with the two agencies.
The new three-year plan will be in place until the end of 2016 and will focus on three key elements to preventing heart disease: smoking cessation, physical activity at schools, and healthier food in hospitals for visitors.
The Champlain region covers numerous municipalities in Eastern Ontario. Hospitals, community centres and school boards all come together under the Champlain umbrella to pool resources for cardiovascular disease prevention.
“We’re trying to really build on the important areas, smoking cessation being the number one factor to prevent cardiovascular disease,” says Sophia Papadakis, program director at Champlain Cardiovascular Network, which is based at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.
“We want to move beyond important projects but into a large-scale community-wide initiative,” she says. “People who need to get some support, access resources, make the changes they need to reduce the risk of heart disease have the ability to do that.”
An example, says Papadakis, is helping people kick the smoking habit. In the last plan, people who smoked could go to a family doctor or hospital for medical help. The new plan is looking at ways to make support more accessible to the community. In-person coaching, phone or web support, and even text-messaging are all options currently being explored.
For healthy schools, the plan will build on its Healthy Schools 20/20 initiative that incorporates nine different school boards across the Champlain region. It will focus on the school environment itself, such as playground equipment and recess programming, to encourage physical activity.
Even messages being sent to children through activities such as selling chocolate bars for fundraising are being addressed in the plan. The goal is to create a consistent message to help kids adopt healthy food and physical behaviours.
The food program in hospitals focuses on healthy food options for visitors. Twenty-two hospitals in the Champlain region will be included.
According to Dr. Andrew Pipe, chairman of the CCPN and chief of prevention and rehabilitation at the Ottawa Heart Institute, the partnership with OPH and the hospital is unusual in Canada.
“It’s a multi-central approach, multi-agency, multi-organizational approach that’s developing region-wide, and under-taking to address issues relevant to prevention of cardiovascular disease,” he says.
“Working in association with an acute care facility is almost unheard of in Canada. I think we can be very proud of what we’re able to do as we’ve addressed the issue of cardiovascular disease across the entire Champlain region.”
The new plan marks the second collaboration between OPH and CCPN. In 2007, the two organizations launched a five-year strategy for cardiovascular disease prevention that focused on six priority areas.
“The new plan is really just trying to look at where we had initial successes in the first five years and either attach it to a new sector or get a little bit more integrated with those factors,” says Laurie Dojeiji, Champlain network manager and health promoter at the Heart Institute. “But I know with environments as a whole and policies around food and physical activity, there is certainly an increased emphasis for the next three years.”