Introduction:
The proposed workshop for An International Deliberative Engagement in Public Health Governance: Towards an Equitable Framework (PHGEF) is an interdisciplinary intervention in public health governance and practice. Despite several public health emergencies of international concern during the last two decades, and expert advice that further and more frequent outbreaks were to be expected, current models of public health governance continue to perpetuate deficits in healthcare services and access. Canada, as with many other countries worldwide, was underprepared, resulting in suboptimal performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective epidemiological and information systems were not in place, healthcare surge capacity was non-existent, data-informed decisions were insufficient, and healthcare workers were over-burdened and under-resourced causing burnout and suboptimal care. Through innovative deliberative ethnographic methods, the PHGEF team, based at the Technoscience and Regulation Research Unit (TRRU) at Dalhousie University (Canada), along with co-investigators across Canada are currently investigating such deficits in healthcare services and access. Through a jointly designed deliberative engagement model (Burgess 2014, O’Doherty 2017; O’Doherty et al. 2021), we are developing a ground-breaking Public Health Governance framework rooted in good governance values (Lowe et al. 2022) that will address the systemic faults and successes of public health care and of health systems management realized during the COVID-19 pandemic. This new framework will be submitted to government decision-makers partnered in this project (the Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada), in Fall 2024 to inform the first Canadian Public Health Act. In our proposed workshop we will collaborate with international world-class experts to test our new governance framework, comparing it with their expertise and knowledge of public health, bioethics, social sciences, legal studies, and health policy. This workshop will help us to highlight potential unforeseen shortcomings, and strengths of this novel approach to health governance, and explore its possible applicability beyond Canada’s national health care system. This novel intervention in public health governance will thus have global implications, as our collaboration with invited workshop participants will push for reform of the Canada health and healthcare system, catalyzing international interventions in equitable health governance, and advancing new policy and legislation focused on democratic inclusion of equity-deserving communities.