Reflecting on the Health Promotion: A Mid-Point Check-In

Coming from a rehabilitation background, I've always focused on helping individuals return to baseline, enabling people to regain function, improve their quality of life, and navigate the recovery process. This course has helped me make a clearer distinction between health promotion and prevention versus health as treatment. Through the course's learning activities, I have discovered that Canada has more health promotion and prevention policies in place than I was previously aware of. However, it has also shown me that despite these policies, there is still work to be done on the social determinants of health to ensure health equity for all Canadians.

Something I have learned about myself through this course is that I am becoming more drawn to the population side of things. I have spent years working one-on-one with clients, but I want to lean into an area where I can have a broader impact. Population health and health promotion seem to be the areas that can develop policy initiatives to create system changes. In the context of brain injury, there is so much potential for prevention, particularly for an upstream approach. If there were more knowledge on injury prevention and protection for brain health, there could be less burden on the system, and fewer lives impacted by brain injury.

This course is having a direct and meaningful impact on my professional work, helping me think more broadly about how to approach gaps in care. I'm currently leading a quality improvement project focused on improving care for individuals with brain injury, and the course has helped me shift my perspective, bringing a stronger awareness to the role of prevention, not just treatment.

Before starting this course, my approach was primarily focused on the local level, looking to fix service gaps within existing structures. Now, I'm thinking more systemically: how can we not only respond to gaps but also prevent them from occurring in the first place? How can we address inequities that affect entire populations, rather than only responding to individual needs?

One thing I keep coming back to is how tough it can be to change health behaviours. Even when people have the right tools, information, and resources, they don't always make choices that support their health. Through this course, I recognize that access to health resources isn't enough. If I want to support people through health promotion, I need to better understand what drives behaviour and what gets in the way. I'm particularly interested in learning more about this area because I believe it could help me develop more effective and meaningful policy recommendations. Policies that actually support people in making changes that stick and are meaningful to them.