The need

There are differences in health outcomes among different communities in Nova Scotia — unfair differences that shouldn’t be there. In response to requests received over the past several years from numerous racialized groups, Nova Scotia is looking to collect race-based data to develop a better understanding of what diverse populations need to be healthy – for prevention, care, and treatment. This need has become even more urgent by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previously, Nova Scotia’s data on diversity has been limited to information on where diverse populations live, without the needed information regarding their health status or access to care.

The solution

Barrington Consulting supported the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Wellness in the Fair Care Project, in partnership with the Office of Equity and Anti-Racism Initiatives, by providing the services of a skilled Project Manager who:

• Worked with multiple stakeholder groups to collaboratively establish a race-based and linguistic identity online data collection service, with integrations into the provincial client registry to validate health card identity information
• Managed the completion of a privacy impact assessment and threat risk assessment to ensure due diligence in managing the highly sensitive data set
• Worked with the provincial medical insurance provider to incorporate equivalent data collection processes into the health card renewal workflow
• Provided regular updates to the executive sponsors of multiple government department stakeholders
• Worked with the analytics teams at NS-DHW to establish data transfer and governance processes
• Worked with Communications Nova Scotia to deliver a cross-departmental marketing and communications plan to the public to encourage public participation in the data collection program
• Managed and documented the project schedule, budget, scope, and risks

The results

The following achievements were realized as a result of Barrington’s support and expertise:

• Over one year of community consultations were performed in an effort to ensure sufficient public engagement from the widest range of community groups was undertaken and incorporated into the data collection and analysis process
• The response rate of Health Card Renewal forms to include race and language identity information is approximately 50%, resulting in over 60,000 responses in the first six months
• A comprehensive social media, traditional media, and print media marketing campaign that reached over eight million views in three months
• A standardized data collection framework that can be consistently used across other government department initiatives for race and language data