Your Voice for a Healthy Community

We know there are many other ways to improve the health of our communities outside of the health care system.

Outside of Health Services, your Community Health Board (CHB) volunteers wanted to know what the issues or conditions are that prevent you, your family, and your community from living healthy lives.

Your voice is important.

Your Community Health Boards thank you for participating to help make our community a healthier place to live, learn, work and play.

What We Heard

We received about 2,200 answers to our questions. Here's what people talked about most:

• We heard that people are looking for opportunities for connection and inclusion in supportive community environments.
• We heard that people have challenges with availability and access to healthy living, recreation, and wellness programs in their communities.
• We heard that people have difficulty accessing healthy food because of cost, availability, transportation, and lack of food skills/knowledge.
• We heard that people experience a variety of issues finding or maintaining safe, affordable, appropriate Housing.

Click/tap here to view an infographic showing what we've heard from our communities so far.

Infographique aussi disponible en français.

We also received over 1,000 comments about Health Service Delivery, and we have shared these with NSHA Primary Health Care. If you would like to know more about how Primary Health Care is responding, please see Shaping Our System Together.

What’s Next?

The CHBs have collectively identified four priorities, and now we are reviewing all your ideas to answer the following…

Together, how do we create Health Promotion partnerships and overcome barriers for all community members to equitably attain optimal wellness – socially, emotionally, and physically – with regard to:

• Opportunities for Connection & Inclusion in Supportive Community Environments;
• Availability & Access to Healthy Living, Recreation, and Wellness Programs;
• Working together upstream to improve Food Security;
• Working together upstream on issues of safe, affordable, appropriate Housing?

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About Community Health Boards

As we compile all this information for our plan for 2019, we want you to know that we are still working hard in your communities and holding steady to our current Community Health Plans, and we can see the positive changes we have effected already!

In our communities, volunteers are some of the hardest working people we know. They bring passion, expertise, dedication, and skill sets to help their communities.

Community Health Board (CHB) volunteers live in our communities and are dedicated to helping people and communities achieve the best health they can. Each CHB is active in their community distributing small grants provided through the NSHA for various groups and activities through our Wellness Funds, providing support to health promotion experts to host education sessions related to our health plan priorities, supporting opportunities for community members and groups with similar interests to network, initiating community discussions, linking community to resources and advocating for healthy public policy at all levels of government.

At CHBs we like to think of ourselves as helpers –We help Nova Scotia Health Authority to learn how things like income, education, employment status, gender, working conditions ... affect our communities and then help make recommendations on ways to improve that. We call these factors The Social Determinants of Health.

CHB’s know that Nova Scotians are very concerned about access to Health Services and we know that Nova Scotia Health Authority is working on that. But we also know that being healthy is more than just illness and we have a role to connect with you and learn more about that.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your local CHB office.