Check out this article in last Friday (28 August 2009) Ontario Health Promotion E-newsletter (OHPE) by Lise Labreque. 
http://www.ohpe.ca/node/10748
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If you've been working in health promotion in Ontario in the past four years, you can't help but have noticed that there is a big train moving through our sector. It is called Chronic Disease Prevention and Management (CDPM). It's an express train, it's moving very fast, and we've all had to jump on board...or else be left in the metaphorical dust!
You might be a health promoter, community developer, manager or executive director of an agency that works in the realm of CDPM. You feel pressured to deliver individual-focused strategies such as physical activity assessments, self-management programs, or nutritional counselling. Yet you know that the research is unequivocal - chronic diseases are not caused exclusively by biomedical factors and individual lifestyle choices, but are also due in large part to social, economic and structural factors ... You see poverty eradication and health equity as the long-term solution to chronic diseases. 
Does this describe your situation? As health promotion practitioners we are often faced with such dilemmas. Perhaps your personal values clash with the agency where you work, or with the communities that you serve. Maybe your agency's value of and work in community capacity building is "in tension" with your funders' request for data on individual interventions. While we may claim to be neutral or objective in our work, the reality is that values influence the decisions we make as front-line workers, as managers, executive directors and boards, and as funders. 
The purpose of this article to describe how one agency, the Centretown Community Health Centre (CHC) has taken on this challenge of balancing our organizational values with the larger context in which we deliver services. More specifically, our experience with CDPM. 
[more at http://www.ohpe.ca/node/10748]
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Let's have some discussion here in CLICK4HP about the issues raised, and the approaches taken by CCHC, as described by Lise Labreque. 

Alison 
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Alison Stirling,
Knowledge Management Developer,
Health Nexus Santé 
180 Dundas Street W., Suite 1900 
Toronto, ON M5G 1Z8 
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