Our Approach
To fulfil our mission, we are developing a respectful path to share meaningful health information with our communities. Our approach includes:
Meaningful Engagement
- Seeking input from our communities on the data needed to achieve health equity
- Documenting the questions our communities ask when we look at data together. These questions could shape our next round of analysis so that Mamow Ahyamowen is always helping to answer the questions that are important to our communities.
Community Control
- Designing analysis plans that communicate how we will prepare and share data
- Using an “opt-in” approach to determine which communities would like to have their data analyzed according to the analysis plan
- Analyzing the data at three different levels:
- The community level where communities can see their own data. This level will have significant sample size limitations particularly for our smallest communities.
- The regional level where sample sizes will be a bit larger but will still have significant limitations.
- The alliance level where we hope to be able to analyze data by sex and look at some time trends.
Understanding and Relevance
Interpreting the data with our communities so that the stories and experiences of community members (sometimes thought of as qualitative data) can interpret, provide context, and give meaning to the numbers (quantitative data). We hope that both the qualitative and quantitative perspectives will be challenged, discussed, and strengthened when we bring the two together.
Local Capacity Building
We want to find additional funding to support our communities to use the data to improve programming. This could include community level program evaluation work, program planning, writing proposals for new or revised programming, or conducting local research so that community leaders can better understand what services are needed.
Ownership of Data
When we complete data analysis, we plan to share community level data only with the community. The community can then choose to share their data with others if they would like to. We will share regional level data only with the appropriate organization. The individual organization can then choose to share their data with others if they would like to. We will share the alliance level data on our website. It will allow our stakeholders to see the progress we are making and understand the high-level trends across First Nations in Northern Ontario without seeing individual community level data.