Pellerin: Healthy Ottawa —The health approach that changes our social and physical environments

By Brigitte Pellerin, Ottawa Citizen, August 29, 2019

Nobody cares as much about your health as you do, except perhaps for Ottawa Public Health. But then, it’s their job, which they do following a principle known as “population health approach.”

(...)Consider walking. If we tweaked the design of our city to encourage more of it, “that could lead to great benefits compared to if we tried to convince every single person to be more active.”

One of the goals in Ottawa’s transportation master plan is to increase the number of trips done using active transportation (transit, biking, walking). If we achieved it, she says, we could decrease the number of diabetes cases by as many as 1,620 over a span of 10 years. “And that’s just with how we build our city and our public transit, bike paths and sidewalks.”

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/pellerin-the-health-approach-that-changes-our-social-and-physical-environments

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