At the federal level, we have the integrated strategy on healthy living and chronic disease. That strategy addresses healthy living across the lifespan. It includes a specific emphasis on seniors--for instance, in the area of falls prevention. It focuses on cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, these illnesses being the major causes of death and disability, and it focuses on addressing risk factors like physical inactivity, poor nutrition, overweight and obesity, and smoking. We also focus through that strategy on Alzheimer's disease and the work we're doing with the neurological health charities.
So how do we do these things that we're doing through these strategies? First of all, we're looking at what's common among them so that we can join up the things that make sense and do them in an integrated fashion.
Prevention and management really require that we take action at the national level, at the provincial-territorial level, and at the local level. Good data are what drive good programs. We've all heard the old adage that you can't manage what you can't measure. We spend a lot of our time measuring and providing data and analysis to provincial and territorial governments, communities, and others so that they can take those data and use them to make change in their own local communities or at the provincial-territorial government level.
Federally, we've created a centre of expertise in surveillance, so people rely on us to do that for them. That's the value-added that we bring. We also focus on effective practices and effective interventions in understanding what works and why.
Many of our strategies provide communities with funding so they can test out interventions. Those interventions then can be shared more broadly to be used by others. We call that initiative the “Canadian Best Practices Initiative”. It involves a huge number of community organizations focusing on specific aspects that are of relevance in their own communities, so that we can learn from them and scale them up as appropriate across the country.