The Core Competencies for Public Health in Canada: Opportunities and Recommendations for Modernization.

Context: The 2008 Public Health Agency of Canada's (PHAC's) "Core Competencies for Public Health in Canada" (the "Canadian core competencies") outline the skills, attitudes, and knowledge essential for the practice of public health. The core competencies represent an important part of public health practice, workforce development, and education in Canada and internationally. However, the core competencies are considered outdated and are facing calls for review, expansion, and revision.

Development of Interventions to Support Provincial Implementation of the Baby-Friendly Initiative: A Study Protocol.

Breastfeeding is internationally recognized as the optimal form of infant nutrition. The Baby-Friendly Initiative (BFI) is an evidence-informed program that leads to improved breastfeeding outcomes. Despite the benefits of breastfeeding, Nova Scotia has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in Canada.

The Governance of Core Competencies for Public Health: A Rapid Review of the Literature.

Core competencies for public health (CCPH) define the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of a public health workforce. Although numerous sets of CCPH have been established, few studies have systematically examined the governance of competency development, review, and monitoring, which is critical to their implementation and impact. This rapid review included 42 articles.

Saying it out loud: explicit equity prompts for public health organization resilience.

Introduction: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic there were numerous stories of health equity work being put "on hold" as public health staff were deployed to the many urgent tasks of responding to the emergency. Losing track of health equity work is not new and relates in part to the need to transfer tacit knowledge to explicit articulation of an organization's commitment to health equity, by encoding the commitment and making it visible and sustainable in policy documents, protocols and processes.

Methods: We adopted a Theory of Change framework to develop training for public health personnel to articulate where and how health equity is or can be embedded in their emergency preparedness processes and documents.

Structural interventions that affect racial inequities and their impact on population health outcomes: a systematic review.

Structural racism is the historical and ongoing reinforcement of racism within society due to discriminatory systems and inequitable distribution of key resources. Racism, embedded within institutional structures, processes and values, perpetuates historical injustices and restricts access to structural factors that directly impact health, such as housing, education and employment. Due to the complex and pervasive nature of structural racism, interventions that act at the structural level, rather than the individual level, are necessary to improve racial health equity.

'Back to better': amplifying health equity, and determinants of health perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: Equity and social justice have long been key tenets of health promotion practice, policy and research. Health promotion foregrounds the pertinence of social, economic, cultural, political and spiritual life in creating and maintaining health. This necessitates a critical structural determinants of health perspective that actively engages with the experiences of health and wellbeing among diverse peoples.

Nimble, efficient and evolving: the rapid response of the National Collaborating Centres to COVID-19 in Canada.

Since December 2019, there has been a global explosion of research on COVID-19. In Canada, the six National Collaborating Centres (NCCs) for Public Health form one of the central pillars supporting evidence-informed decision making by gathering, synthesizing and translating emerging findings. Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada and located across Canada, the six NCCs promote and support the use of scientific research and other knowledges to strengthen public health practice, programs and policies.

The Canadian Nurses Association: Reflections on the NCLEX-RN through the Lens of Nursing History and Evolution.

Decades of work by professional associations, regulators and educators have produced an ethical, reliable, robustly educated and regulated nursing workforce that enjoys high levels of respect in Canada and around the world. The officers of the Canadian Nurses Association comment here on the organization's history and changing role in regulatory policy over the past decade during the introduction of the American NCLEX-RN examination as the assessment tool for entry-to-practice for Canadian registered nurses. Facing forward, to maintain a strong, trusted nursing workforce the association remains committed to meaningful collaboration among nursing's professional, regulatory, education and union sectors.

Three Decades of Professional Nursing Leadership: The Impact of the Community Health Nurses of Canada.

In 1987, six Canadian community health nursing leaders recognized the need for a national body to represent and advocate for the diverse practice of community health nursing and the health of communities. Their vision and action three decades ago resulted in the formation of the Community Health Nurses of Canada (CHNC), a national professional nursing association. This paper will describe the development of CHNC from an early vision to a recognized centre of excellence for community health nursing in Canada.

Swimming against the tide: A Canadian qualitative study examining the implementation of a province-wide public health initiative to address health equity.

Background: Effectively addressing the social determinants of health and health equity are critical yet still-emerging areas of public health practice. This is significant for contemporary practice as the egregious impacts of health inequities on health outcomes continue to be revealed. More public health organizations seek to augment internal organizational capacity to address health equity while the evidence base to inform such leadership is in its infancy.

The primacy of relationships: a study of public health nursing practice from a critical caring perspective.

Critical caring is a midrange theory proposed as a framework to guide public health nursing practice. This article reports findings of a study that examined the relevance of the theory to the practice of expert public health nurses (PHNs). Twenty-six PHNs participated in this study: 10 in interviews and 16 in 2 focus groups.

Witnessing social injustice downstream and advocating for health equity upstream: "the trombone slide" of nursing.

Two aspects of a study examining the congruence of critical caring theory with public health nursing practice are reported. They confirm a congruence between expert public health nursing practice and the theory in terms of (a) a caring/social justice ethics that underpins practice and (b) the relevance to their practice of the carative health promoting process of contributing to the creation of supportive and sustainable physical, social, political, and economic environments. Public health nurse participants encountered many barriers to a practice underpinned by a caring/social justice ethic, some of which limited their moral agency.

Community health nursing vision for 2020: shaping the future.

As health care is shifting from hospital to community, community health nurses (CHNs) are directly affected. This descriptive qualitative study sought to understand priority issues currently facing CHNs, explore development of a national vision for community health nursing, and develop recommendations to shape the future of the profession moving toward the year 2020. Focus groups and key informant interviews were conducted across Canada.