Notice to PHABC Membership

2020 Annual General Meeting – November 19 ONLINE!

We hope to see many of you online Thursday November 19th, 2020 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm for our Annual General Meeting. Join us via Zoom to learn what our association has been doing this past year and in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and what our plans are for the upcoming year. Whether you are new to the association or one of our long-standing members, please consider joining us to keep up to date on what PHABC does, what we are advocating for, and how you can get involved.

The AGM is free to access and open to all members, please join us on the 19^th by following the link below:

https://zoom.us/j/91506805063?pwd=cUJmbDNST1RMNzZyYlJqYXFyM0hMdz09

The AGM will run until 1:00pm and immediately after we are pleased to announce that we will be hosting the opening stage of “The Gallery of Memories.” This project has been spearheaded by the Capacity Building Committee Co-chairs and will support the collecting of stories, art, and experiences of Public Health Professionals working under colliding pandemics. We are excited to welcome the following storytellers as they talk about the impact that COVID-19 has had on their professional and personal lives:

• Trevor Hancock, Morris dancer and Professor & Senior Scholar (Retired), School of Public Health and Social Policy, University of Victoria
• Lara Frederick, Public Health Program Lead, Northeast Division, Northern Health
• Mariah Robinson, Administrator, Whe-la-la-U Area Council Society and Member of ‘NAMGIS First Nation
• Paola Ardiles, Faculty Teaching Fellow & Lecturer, Social Innovation and Community Partnerships, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University

We encourage you to stay and listen to their experiences, this is meant to be the start of an engaging project to celebrate public health professionals across the province. Maybe we will tell your story next!

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The Island Health authority has issued an overdose advisory for Greater Victoria. The advisory, issued on Tuesday afternoon, states there “is an increase of overdoses in the Greater Victoria area.” Island Health is reminding people to call 911, provide rescue breathing and give naloxone if someone overdoses.

The health authority also has tips for safer use, including:

• Visit a local Overdose Prevention / Supervised Consumption Service (OPS/SCS) for witnessed consumption and drug checking.
• Try the LifeguardApp on your phone.
• Talk to your doctor or health-care provider about your medical options, including prescriptions.
• Carry naloxone and have an overdose response plan.
• Fix with a friend, and if you are alone, be close to help.
• Stagger your use with a friend, so someone can respond if needed.
• Do a tester and try a little before your regular hit.

On September 28, 2020, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year old Atikamekw woman from Manawan, died in the Centre hospitalier de Lanaudiere in Joliette, Quebec. The livestreamed video recorded before her death shows at least 2 hospital employees hurling racist, hateful insults at her. Joyce died shortly after recording the video. She had also been restrained to her hospital bed. This was not the first racist incident at the hospital that Joyce had experienced in her short life. Her death, and the growing pandemic of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada has sparked national protests, calling for reforms and giving urgency to the anti-racist movement in our country.

• We need to make our voices heard, to acknowledge that systemic racism exists in Canada, to address this racism, and carry our voices all the way to Parliament.
• We must call on the federal government to adopt anti-racism as a sixth pillar of the Canada Health Act,  prohibiting discrimination based on race and affords everyone the right to the equal protection and benefit of the law.

The Canadian Public Health Association supports this call to action. I urge each of you (as individuals) and your respective organizations endorse this call.

It is time to act. We need your support.

On behalf of PHABC we appreciated the call to act on systemic racism and lend our voice to this Call for Support.  It is fully consistent with our policies and intention to address inequalities in Canada and our active projects with the BIPOC community in BC.

I am also pleased to include my name as an individual and anticipate our membership will be pleased to as well.  I am ccing our communications team so that this can be widely shared on our social media.

From the National Observer, October 19, 2020

School meal programs should be more than a meal — they should anchor school curriculum and root kids into their school, advocates say.

Canada is the only G7 country without a national school meal program, with a patchwork of school-based and regional programs partially filling a gap exacerbated by the pandemic. It’s an inadequate system that needs reform — an opportunity, say advocates pushing for a universal, national school lunch program, to rethink the role of food in Canadian schools.

“There’s three reasons why we don’t have a national school food program in Canada,” said Debbie Field, co-ordinator for the Coalition for Healthy School Food, a national organization advocating for a Canada-wide school food program.

Read the full article HERE: