Cameron Norman

• BA (Hons), MA, PhD, MDes
• Professor (Associate) at University of Toronto

Aims Fundamental roadblocks, such as non-use and low eHealth literacy, prevent the implementation of eHealth resources. The aims were to study internet usage for health information and eHealth literacy in patients after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Further, we aimed to evaluate temporal changes and determine whether use of the internet...

National health strategies are integral in defining the vision and strategic direction for ensuring the health of a population or for a specific health area. To facilitate a national coordinated approach in spinal cord injury (SCI) research and care in Canada, Praxis Spinal Cord Institute, with support from national experts and funding from the Gov...

Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: Public hospital(s). Main funding source(s): The Western Norway Health Authority Background Evidence supports the use of electronic health (eHealth) programmes for patients with coronary artery disease. To date, there has been little attention toward patients’ preferences for the use of eHealth prog...

Funding Acknowledgements The Western Norway Health Authority. OnBehalf The CONCARD-PCI Investigators Background In recent years an internet-based technology has become an important source for providing health information to patients after an acute cardiac event. Therefore, consideration of patients’ perceived eHealth literacy skills, is crucial f...

Background Web-based technology has recently become an important source for sharing health information with patients after an acute cardiac event. Therefore, consideration of patients’ perceived electronic health (eHealth) literacy skills is crucial for improving the delivery of patient-centered health information. Objective The aim of this study w...

Purpose: EatRight Ontario (ERO), a multi-modal dietitian service (phone, email, web), provided the public and health intermediaries with healthy eating advice, professional support, and health promotion tools from 2007 to 2018. An evaluation of ERO was conducted to assess the impact of the model on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour for consumers,...

BACKGROUND Web-based technology has recently become an important source for sharing health information with patients after an acute cardiac event. Therefore, consideration of patients’ perceived electronic health (eHealth) literacy skills is crucial for improving the delivery of patient-centered health information. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study...

Achieving nature conservation goals require grappling with ‘wicked’ problems. These intractable problems arise from the complexity and dynamism of the social–ecological systems in which they are embedded. To enhance their ability to address these problems, conservation professionals are increasingly looking to the transdisciplines of systems thinki...

Systems thinking has emerged as a means of conceptualizing and addressing complex public health problems, thereby challenging more commonplace understanding of problems and corresponding solutions as straightforward explanations of cause and effect. Systems thinking tries to address the complexity of problems through qualitative and quantitative mo...

BACKGROUND Digital mobile technology presents a promising medium for reaching young adults with smoking cessation interventions because they are the heaviest users of this technology. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of an evidence-informed smartphone app for smoking cessation, Crush the Crave (CTC), on reducing smokin...

Background: Digital mobile technology presents a promising medium for reaching young adults with smoking cessation interventions because they are the heaviest users of this technology. Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of an evidence-informed smartphone app for smoking cessation, Crush the Crave (CTC), on reducing smo...

Rapid Response Letter to commentary doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j3876

Connecting people to useful, actionable health resources is a substantive challenge that sits at the heart of health communication. Digital media provides means of producing, distributing and revising content and creates possibilities for new and multiple channels for reaching and engaging audiences, particularly when combined with social media. Wh...

Background: A changing and cluttered information landscape has put pressure on health organizations to produce consumer information materials that are not only factual but high quality and engaging to audiences. User-centered design methods can be useful in obtaining feedback from consumers; however, they are labor intensive and slow, which is not...

Background: Inadequate functional health literacy is a common problem in immigrant populations. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between oral (dental) health literacy (OHL) and participation in oral health care among Brazilian immigrants in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Methods: The study used a cross-sectional design and a c...

Objectives: Individuals seeking information about electronic cigarettes are increasingly turning to social media networks like Twitter. We surveyed dominant Twitter communications about e-cigarettes and smoking cessation, examining message sources, themes, and attitudes. Methods: Tweets from 2014 were searched for mentions of e-cigarettes and sm...

Social Media (SM) may extend the reach and impact for smoking cessation among young adult smokers. To-date little research targeting young adults has been done on the use of social media to promote quitting smoking. We assessed the effect of an innovative multi-component web-based and SM approach known as Break-it-Off (BIO) on young adult smoking c...

Background: Tobacco use remains the number one cause of preventable chronic disease and death in developed countries worldwide. In North America, smoking rates are highest among young adults. Despite that the majority of young adult smokers indicate wanting to quit, smoking rates among this age demographic have yet to decline. Helping young adults...

Social media is a powerful, rapid, and popular way of communication amongst people around the world. How can health professionals and patients use this strategy to achieve optimal disease management and prevention and attainment of wellness? An interdisciplinary group at University of British Columbia, supported by a grant from UBC Peter Wall Insti...

Objective: To investigate the oral health literacy of expectant Canadian Aboriginal mothers and their knowledge of infant oral health and oral health care needs. Methods: Data are from the baseline questionnaires collected by the Baby Teeth Talk Study, testing an early childhood caries multi-pronged intervention among pregnant Canadian Aboriginal...

Global health care and promotion in the twenty-first century faces challenges posed by aging populations, mass migration, environmental threats, and the rise of new types of infectious diseases; issues that are interconnected, dynamic in nature, and without precedent. These are commonly calledwicked problems: ones that are complex, ill formulated,...

Background Emerging eHealth tools could facilitate the delivery of comprehensive care in time-constrained clinical settings. One such tool is interactive computer-assisted health-risk assessments (HRA), which may improve provider-patient communication at the point of care, particularly for psychosocial health concerns, which remain under-detected i...

There are tradeoffs in knowledge synthesis – for example, between comprehensiveness and timeliness, between generalisability and policy relevance. The tradeoffs are particularly challenging for public health. A growing international community is grappling with building more relevant and useful knowledge bases, to facilitate use of this knowledge in...

Social media and the multimedia networks that they support provide a platform for engaging youth and young adults across diverse contexts in a manner that supports different forms of creative expression. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience using eHealth promotion strategies to youth engagement, the Youth Voices Research Group (YVRG) and its...

Refugees experience multiple health and social needs. This requires an integrated approach to care in the countries of resettlement, including Canada. Perhaps, interactive eHealth tools could build bridges between medical and social care in a timely manner. The authors developed and piloted a multi-risk Computer-assisted Psychosocial Risk Assessmen...

As the use of eHealth grows and diversifies globally, the concept of eHealth literacy - a foundational skill set that underpins the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for health - becomes more important than ever to understand and advance. EHealth literacy draws our collective attention to the knowledge and complex skill set th...

Telemedicine and telehealth programs are generally more complex than their traditional on-site health care delivery counterparts. A few organizations have developed sustainable, multispecialty telemedicine programs, but single service programs, such as teleradiology and teledermatology, are common. Planning and maintaining a successful telemedicine...

This article discusses consumer-directed technologies for health care and promotion in light of the rapid expansion of consumer-oriented tools and technologies, which has redefined telehealth. The difference between traditional telehealth services focused on supporting or augmenting institutional-based health care activities, and consumer-directed...

Healthcare transition (HCT) for youth with disabilities is a complex phenomenon influenced by multiple interacting factors, including health, personal and environmental factors. Current research on the transition to adulthood for disabled youth has primarily focused on identifying these multilevel factors to guide the development of interventions t...

Increasingly funders of life sciences research are promoting large interdisciplinary teams in order to address complex problems. This creates a dissonance with academic institutions that value and reward faculty members based on their independence. We have taken advantage of a natural experiment, the formation of a new life sciences institute, to e...

Almost a decade ago, public health initiated a number of innovative ventures to attract investments from multinational drug companies for the development of new drugs and vaccines to tackle neglected diseases (NDs). These ventures - known as product development public-private partnerships (PD PPPs) - represent the participation of the public and pr...

Complex health problems such as chronic disease or pandemics require knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries to generate solutions. Such transdisciplinary discovery requires researchers to work and collaborate across boundaries, combining elements of basic and applied science. At the same time, calls for more interdisciplinary health scie...

To pilot test a newly developed breastfeeding self-efficacy intervention. Pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT). An acute care hospital located in Northwestern Ontario that is the sole provider of maternity care for the city and referral center for the region. One-hundred-and-fifty primiparous women intending to breastfeed their healthy, term, si...

Complex problems require strategies to engage diverse perspectives in a focused, flexible manner, yet few options exist that fit with the current health care and public health system constraints. The Complex Network Electronic Knowledge Translation Research model (CoNEKTR) brings together complexity science, design thinking, social learning theorie...

Health literacy is an important resource for understanding a patient's health-related behaviour and for empowering participation in their health care process. In dentistry, there has been increased awareness of the effects of literacy on oral health behaviours; however, no study has developed a conceptual framework that explains the relationship be...

The timely incorporation of health research into the routine practice of individual health practitioners and interprofessional teams is a widely recognized and ongoing challenge. Health professional engagement and learning is an important cog in the wheel of knowledge translation; passive dissemination of evidence through journals and clinical prac...

Complex problems require strategies that leverage the knowledge of diverse actors working in a coordinated manner in order to address them in a manner that is appropriate to the context. Such strategies require building relationships among groups that enable them to network in ways that have the intensity of face-to-face meetings, but also extend o...

This paper aims to describe methods and models designed to build a comprehensive, integrative framework to guide the research to policy and practice cycle in health care. Current models of science are summarised, identifying specific challenges they create for knowledge to action (KTA). Alternative models for KTA are outlined to illustrate how rese...

Health promotion is where clinical practice and prevention science intersect to address complex or 'wicked' problems that have multiple sources and require a broad perspective to address. This means focusing on the social determinants of health and the complex individual, community and environmental interactions that influence health and wellbeing....

A review of Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation, by Ralph Stacey, 2001. London, UK: Routledge, xii + 243 pp. ISBN 0‐415‐ 24918‐8. $56.95 USD

These are commentaries on a Cochrane review, published in this issue of EBCH, first published as: Thomas RE, Baker PRA, Lorenzetti D. Family-based programmes for preventing smoking by children and adolescents. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 1. Art. No.: CD004493. DOI: 10.1002/14 651 858.CD004493.pub2. Further information for th...

To evaluate the impact of a classroom-based, Web-assisted tobacco intervention addressing smoking prevention and cessation with adolescents. A two-group randomized control trial with 1,402 male and female students in grades 9 through 11 from 14 secondary schools in Toronto, Canada. Participants were randomly assigned to a tailored Web-assisted toba...

This paper was prepared by the National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC) Working Group on Translational Research and Knowledge Transfer. The goal was to nurture common ground upon which to build a platform for translating what we know about cancer into what we do in practice and policy. Methods included expert panels, literature review, and concep...

Tobacco control in the 21(st) century faces many of the same challenges as in the past, but in different contexts, settings and enabled by powerful new tools including those delivered by information and communication technologies via computer, videocasts, and mobile handsets to the world. Building on the power of electronic networks, Web-assisted t...

Systems thinking is attracting great interest in public health as a conceptual orientation to solving complex challenges around health care renewal in developed countries. Our approach is based on the tenet that effective systems thinking relies on the development of a trans-disciplinary knowledge base integrating traditional complex adaptive syste...

Since 1995, TeenNet Research (www.teennet.ca) has been a leader in developing strategies for involving youth and adults in co-creating e-health-promotion Web sites and behavior-change programs. In this article we review TeenNet's experience and lessons learned from more than a decade of action research with youth, with an emphasis on the guiding fr...

This widely respected resource continues to deliver practice-focused, useful information you won't see anywhere else. Topics in E-Health include "Novel Implementations of Information Technology in Support of Adolescent Health Knowledge Acquisition," "Extending Electronic Health Records to Improve Adolescent Health," "Office-Based Computerized Risk-...

Current and emerging public health challenges require a new approach to research training. The purpose of the CIHR-Strategic Training Program in Tobacco Research (STPTR) is to equip the next generation of scientific leaders with the knowledge, skills and experiences that will enhance their ability to conduct tobacco research that will have a positi...

Health education and health promotion have a tradition of using information and communication technology (ICT). In recent years, the rapid growth of the Internet has created innovative opportunities for Web-based health education and behavior change applications-termed eHealth promotion. However, many eHealth promotion applications are developed wi...

Electronic health resources are helpful only when people are able to use them, yet there remain few tools available to assess consumers' capacity for engaging in eHealth. Over 40% of US and Canadian adults have low basic literacy levels, suggesting that eHealth resources are likely to be inaccessible to large segments of the population. Using infor...

Health services and population health innovations advance when knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) occurs among researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and consumers using high-quality evidence. However, few KTE models have been evaluated in practice. Communities of practice (CoP) - voluntary, self-organizing, and focused groups of individuals...

Electronic health tools provide little value if the intended users lack the skills to effectively engage them. With nearly half the adult population in the United States and Canada having literacy levels below what is needed to fully engage in an information-rich society, the implications for using information technology to promote health and aid i...

EHealth has developed largely from an interdisciplinary framework and, as such, does not have a “home” discipline. The absence of this home discipline has allowed eHealth research to be published widely in journals ranging from the medical sciences, to engineering, to social science or to business and policy studies. The result of this fragmented,...

Investigated aspects of student development facilitated by focusing on community-building in a peer counseling team of six female and three male college students. Results show that by experiencing community with their peers, students reported enhanced ability and a desire to create community within and outside the university. (Author/RJM)

This critical ethnography examines the perceptions of adolescents at-risk with respect to their experiences of help, both formal and informal. Ten (10) adolescents who had been involved with the Bridges psychoeducational program, an interagency partnership intervention for high-risk youth in the Waterloo region, were interviewed about their experie...

Youth are enthusiastic consumers of electronic media and attracted to the Internet. Internet access brings novel opportunities to reach youth with health promotion messages, through a medium that permits customization and the opportunity to network knowledge between individuals or entire classrooms. Two established virtual classroom environments, o...