The Impact of Health Geography on Public Health Research, Policy, and Practice in Canada

Abstract

The link between geography and health means that the places we occupy—where we are born, where we live, where we work, and where we play—have a direct impact on our health, including our experiences of health. A subdiscipline of human geography, health geography studies the relationships between our environments and the impact of factors that operate within those environments on human health. Researchers have focused on the social and physical environments, including spatial location, patterns, causes of disease and related outcomes, and health service delivery. The work of health geographers has adopted various theories and philosophies (i.e., positivism, social interactionism, structuralism) and methods to collect and analyze data (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, spatial analysis) to examine our environments and their relationship to health. The field of public health is an organized effort to promote the health of its population and prevent disease, injury, and premature death. Public health agencies and practitioners develop programs, services, and policies to promote healthy environments to support and enable health. This commentary provides an overview of the recent landscape of health geography and makes a case for how health geography is critically important to the field of public health, including examples from the field to highlight these links in practice.