Making sense of recurrent boom and bust cycles in Canadian public health systems

Making sense of recurrent boom and bust cycles in Canadian public health systems

Presented by Dr. Ak'ingabe Guyon and Dr. Jasmine Pawa 

Webinar Details

Friday, December 5, 2025

1:00-2:00pm Eastern Time

Webinar via Zoom (details provided up on registration)

Description

PHPC members are invited to join our next webinar, hosted by Dr. Ak’ingabe Guyon and Dr. Jasmine Pawa. Dr. Guyon and Dr. Pawa will be speaking about their recently published commentary in the Canadian Journal of Public Health: Guyon A, Masse Jolicoeur M, Pawa J. 2025. Making sense of recurrent boom and bust cycles in Canadian public health systems. Can J Public Health. https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-025-01110-9 

Public health systems undergo recurrent “boom and bust” cycles, also described as panic and neglect. Given such turbulence, we argue that Canadian public health workers, institutions, and systems would benefit from more spaces for sensemaking and policy capacity.  Indeed, our approaches in public health often focus on the content of an intervention  (e.g. presenting population health issues; investigating and managing outbreaks or environmental health incidents). We may sometimes neglect the context, process, and actors that are highly relevant to the decision. Sensemaking and analytical competences help us integrate across these areas. By periodically zooming out through this analytical lens, we can perhaps improve our day-to-day decisions and course of action, better identify when to initiate, pull back, or stop public health interventions and policies, and ultimately improve public health practice.

About the presenters

Dr. Guyon has been a RCPSC fellow in Public health and preventive medicine since 2008.  She has cumulated public health work and training experiences in multiple regional and provincial Quebec public health institutions, rural British-Columbia, East Africa, England and Denmark. She practices in Montreal and has academic appointments with the McGill School of Population and Global Health and the École de Santé Publique de l’Université de Montréal. Her main professional interests are around public health systems, healthy public policy and general public health practice.