Are family medicine residents trained to counsel patients on physical activity? The Canadian experience and a call to action.

Physical inactivity is a leading risk factor for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and early mortality. Family physicians have an important role in providing physical activity counselling to patients to help prevent and treat NCDs. Lack of training on physical activity counselling is a barrier in undergraduate medical education, yet little is known regarding physical activity teaching in postgraduate family medicine residency.

Criteria-Based Resource Allocation: A Tool to Improve Public Health Impact.

Objective: Resource allocation in local public health (LPH) has been reported as a significant challenge for practitioners and a Public Health Services and Systems Research priority. Ensuring available resources have maximum impact on community health and maintaining public confidence in the resource allocation process are key challenges. A popular strategy in health care settings to address these challenges is Program Budgeting and Marginal Analysis (PBMA).

Estimating background rates of Guillain-Barré Syndrome in Ontario in order to respond to safety concerns during pandemic H1N1/09 immunization campaign.

Background: The province of Ontario, Canada initiated mass immunization clinics with adjuvanted pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine in October 2009. Due to the scale of the campaign, temporal associations with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and vaccination were expected. The objectives of this analysis were to estimate the number of background GBS cases expected to occur in the projected vaccinated population and to estimate the number of additional GBS cases which would be expected if an association with vaccination existed.