Reflection on Health Promotion

Health promotion means accessibility, advocacy, and increasing health literacy.   

The image below speaks to me as it starts cancer prevention conversations with community members. It allows them to share where they struggle, time, environment, stressors, family responsibilities, and more. In these moments, they begin to advocate for themselves and seek validation. I find that in these times, managing their expectations and validating their barriers helps build trust and leads to more dialogue. 

Image: Canadian Cancer Society, March 2020 

In my role in cancer prevention, we support change management initiatives for four province-wide screening programs. When a change is announced, we must understand how it will affect communities and make the information accessible. For example, in March 2025, the Ontario Cervical Screening Program updated its cervical screening from Pap test to HPV test. My role in community engagement is to engage with community partners, learn their goals, needs, and gaps in access and resources. From there, we start planning.  

Ontario Health provided our team with Afrocentric cervical screening resources. We then referenced our population health data to learn more about the Black community in our region. We connected with community partners who support the Black community and learned there is a knowledge gap around cervical screening and that resources would be appreciated. From this interaction, we built relationships, learned about the knowledge gap in terms of cancer prevention and screening, and were included in future engagement opportunities.  

The result was a dissemination plan and engagement schedule targeted to the Black population, increasing awareness, education, and accessibility by promoting our cervical screening pop-up clinics to individuals without primary care access.   

What stood out to me most was how much health promotion needs to involve the community we support. Relationship-building, alongside reviewing population data, reshaped how we approached the whole rollout.  The partners knew about community barriers and trust in ways no dataset could capture. That relationship-building piece is easy to overlook when you're focused on disseminating resources, but it's the foundation of whether those resources land.