Summary of Proceedings

The Committee Co-Chairs welcomed participants to the fourth Virtual NSAC meeting as part of a series of meetings on the topic of, “Monitoring to discern and understand new and emerging trends impacting the nutritional health of Canadians”. Approval of the meeting agenda was sought, which had two objectives:

Objectives:

1. Review and approve the Record of Proceedings from the third meeting
2. Discuss and provide advice on how to be more responsive in monitoring

The Co-Chairs reminded members of Health Canada’s transparency approach for the Committee and the importance of declaring Members’ affiliations and interests before each meeting to help meet its goal of generating the best independent advice. There were no changes to members’ affiliations and interests. The agenda was approved without changes.

To set the stage for the discussion, the Co-Chairs provided a brief presentation to:

• remind the Committee about the theme guiding the discussion: Monitoring to discern and understand new and emerging trends impacting the nutritional health of Canadians;
• provide highlights from the discussion at the Third meeting, which focused on what to monitor to understand the impact of disruptors on the nutritional health of Canadians;
• introduce the topic of this meeting’s discussion: How to be more responsive in monitoring

• provided a brief overview of the Statistics Canada Health Data Program and the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS);
• discussed the challenges and benefits of large population health surveys , as well as the opportunity for innovation;
• presented the tools used in data collection and data monitoring, including the Omnibus follow-up panels, Social Data Linkage Environment, Collection applications;
• explained how key nutrition-related information is collected by Statistics Canada.

Following a short question and answer period, the Co-Chairs thanked the presenters and acknowledged that the presentation provided the Committee with helpful considerations.

Based on points raised during the brainstorming session, the Co-Chairs led a focussed discussion with members to provide clear, concrete advice on how to better monitor in order to understand the impacts of ‘disruptors’.

Advice was captured in three broad categories:

• Data,
• Methods of Data Collection, and
• Collaboration.

To further refine the advice, Committee members identified the most important and relevant items in each category. Emerging themes relate to strengthening approaches regarding equity, diversity and inclusion; developing and using newer, more nimble approaches for data collection; and enhancing data linkage across multiple domains and data sources.

Co-chairs reminded the Committee that the next meeting in this series will focus on bringing together the advice on “what” and “how” to better understand new and emerging trends impacting the nutritional health of Canadians.

The Co-Chairs thanked Members for their active participation.