GIS and Public Health

Over the last decade, health experts have started to acknowledge the influence the built and natural environments have on health and health behaviours. Urban design, rural environments, accessibility to green space, air quality, and many other factors are found to influence different aspects of our health and well-being. In this micro-credential, you will learn how to better understand how to use GIS to better understand how the environment influences health and health behaviour outcomes. You will learn about spatial distribution of health outcomes and developing environmental measures of accessibility, density, and diversity. Learning Outcomes: 1. To understand how to assess the spatial distribution of health outcomes 2. To understand how the measure and assess the built and natural environments 3. To understand how the measure and assess the built and natural environments. Total class hours - 16

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have a long history in assessing disease, health, and health behaviours around the world. From John Snow mapping Cholera cases in 1854 London, England to the monitoring of the spread of COVID-19, epidemiologists, public health practitioners, and health geographers have been analyzing the spatial patterns of health outcomes for decades. In this micro-credential, you will learn the basics of GIS using ArcGIS Online by exploring the Social Determinants of Healthy in your community using data from the Census of Canada. You will develop skills focusing on cartography, the dos and don'ts of mapping health data, developing indices, and examining relationships between social determinants of health with health outcomes. Learning Outcomes: 1. To understand basic cartographic principles 2. To understand how geographical error can impact health mapping. 3. To understand how to combine data to create a topic-specific social determinants of health index 4. To understand how spatial data can be used to assess health outcome data. Total class hours - 32

Population health interventions are an important part of public health, as they provide a way to affordably address a health concern or behaviour for a neighbourhood, community, or region. While the success of these interventions to change outcomes can be mixed, research shows that the most effective and efficient way to increase the success of an intervention is to geographically target areas where your target population live, work, and play. In this micro-credential, you will use multicriteria decision making in a GIS environment to assess a community to target the best location for your intervention to occur. You will use your own project and data (or one provided to you) to identify the target population, assess the geography of your study area, and complete an analysis to identify locations where your real or hypothetical intervention should occur. Learning Outcomes: 1. To understand how to define and assess your target population 2. To understand data that can be used to assess your target population 3. To understand how to create metrics to support multicriteria decision making 4. To understand how to conduct a multicriteria decision making analysis Total class hours - 16