Are We Measuring the Right Things in the Rights Ways? Local Perspectives on the Influence of Environment on Community Health in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada

Interest in sound health information and health indicators, has never been higher. An important area of emerging focus in health indicators research is towards a better understanding of local settings. It has been argued that small, rural and remote communities have particular sets of characteristics that are generally not well captured in more typical national and regional level studies. Genuinely community level indicators are different in character than merely an aggregation of individual level indicators for particular geographic regions, and relate to the physical and social environments of communities. At the same time the argument for local measures has been unfolding, there has also been a shift towards criticizing the use of mainstream health indicators to assess health of Indigenous communities. This has been accompanied by a call to develop more culturally relevant indicators at the local community level. This presentation will describe a research project that is testing and further developing indicators of community health appropriate to northern Saskatchewan Indigenous communities, focusing on results that elucidate local perspectives of the environment as a determinant of community health. Implications for the development of new community specific measures of environment as it relates to the health of northern Saskatchewan Indigenous communities will be discussed.

Sylvia Abonyi holds a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Health and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. She is also a research faculty member with the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit (SPHERU). Trained as an anthropologist, her current research interests lie in the areas of culture as a health determinant, the development of community health frameworks and indicators, and evaluation research.