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Public Health and GeoConnections

Public health involves promoting health, preventing disease, prolonging life, and improving quality of life. Public health practitioners can take advantage of GeoConnections and the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) to do their jobs more effectively and improve public health.

A number of variables tend to influence public health: the environment… socio-economic status… age… family medical history… and location, to name a few. And the multi-dimensional data about these variables tends to come from organizations at a variety of levels: federal, provincial or territorial, and local.

By capitalizing on the CGDI, however, health practitioners can integrate and analyze public health data more effectively and gain critical insights into public health issues and solutions. For instance, a public health agency that uses the CGDI to map the spread of a disease will be well-prepared to predict the disease's physical course and its rate of spread. Armed with this insight, health officials will be better equipped to mitigate the disease's effects.

In short, the CGDI offers the public health community two main advantages. First, public health professionals can use geospatial data and the CGDI for analysis and decision making, bringing geographic and temporal aspects to the study of public health issues and approaches. And second, by providing access to a network of databases over the Internet, the CGDI assists health jurisdictions throughout the country to interact and share data more efficiently and securely.