Expanding health surveillance in Canadian federal prisons

C-CHANGE (Canadian Correctional Health information for Action Group Endeavour), led by Fiona Kouyoumdjian and coordinated by Jessica Gaber, was funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada from October 2021 through March 2024, and focused on developing health surveillance in Canadian federal prisons.

We supported Correctional Service Canada in expanding health surveillance through developing case definitions and providing evidence and best practices. We also expanded the field of correctional health surveillance overall.

This work included: describing structures to support correctional health surveillance, best practices in community-academic-corrections partnerships, and health indicators to track for women in prison. It also includes multiple sub-studies based on qualitative research with 61 varied focus group and interview participants, with the primary objective of understanding their needs and priorities for correctional health surveillance, and secondary analyses focused on primary care, aging, Indigenous health, and access to and use of correctional health information.