Completed in 2024 City project

Healthy City Strategy

Diabetes is affecting a rapidly growing number of Mississauga residents. The City has worked with partners, experts and communities to develop a strategy to prevent cases from rising and move toward a healthier city.

Milestones

1

2022 to Spring 2023

Phase 1: Project Initiation
2

Summer 2023

Phase 2: Problem Definition
3

Summer/Fall 2023

Phase 3: Design Interventions
4

Winter 2023 to 2024

Phase 4: Test, Refine Strategy & Action Plan
5

2025 and beyond

Phase 5: Implentation

Overview

Diabetes is affecting a rapidly growing number of Mississauga residents. The prevalence rate of type 2 diabetes in most neighbourhoods in Mississauga ranges from 13 to 16.9% . These rates exceed the Ontario average of 9.8%.

The Healthy City Strategy provides staff and decision makers with a health equity lens they can apply to the planning and development of City programs, policies, initiatives and infrastructure. It includes 25 actions across 10 themes including those identified by the community through co-designed and collaborative engagement.

The strategy is guided by a vision that Mississauga will be a city where all people thrive and are healthy, active, connected and are supported within their community. It embeds a “health equity” perspective into the City’s decision making to recognize the health, environmental and social differences across Mississauga and work towards decreasing the prevalence of diabetes and other chronic diseases in the city.

Background

In November 2021, Council supported the City’s membership in the Cities for Better Health program (CBH – formerly Cities Changing Diabetes) and unanimously signed the Urban Diabetes Declaration, joining a network of over 50 international cities to better understand and curb the rise of type 2 diabetes.

Since then, we’ve been working with CBH and other partners on the development of the Healthy City Strategy. The City has benefited from the CBH’s shared resources and learnings from around the world informing the strategy.

It incorporates input from research and data experts, health research findings and the experiences of other municipalities to pursue an evidence-informed approach. These experts include the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) Novo Nordisk Network for Healthy Populations (NHP), Institute for Better Health Trillium Health Partners Family and Child Health Initiative and Peel Public Health.

The Strategy focuses on compact, complete and connected neighbourhoods; community services and programming in support of active living and education; and collaborations with the researchers, community, organizations, business, agency and government. It outlines how the City can influence positive change without taking on responsibilities that belong to other organizations or levels of government.

More than 1,000 participants provided feedback to help inform the strategy, which captured their lived experience and identified needs and priorities for healthy living. For more information read the community engagement report, report appendices and community meeting notes (October 2024).

On December 11, 2024, Mississauga Council unanimously voted to approve the Mississauga Healthy City Strategy.

Moving forward, the City will begin to reference the Healthy City Strategy and its health equity lens in its planning and implementation of programs.

Our collaborators

Developing a strategy has required an evidence-informed approach, and we needed experts and data to understand diabetes in Mississauga. This important work has been and will continue to be reliant on our policy, data and research experts.

Together the City, partners, experts and community contributed to Healthy City Strategy.

Peel Public Health

Peel Public Health (PPH) is made up of health experts, practitioners, researchers and change-makers with a goal to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. More information on PPH’s role in chronic disease prevention can be found online at Healthy Complete Communities, School Health Program, Children and Parenting, Health Status Reports and The Healthy Development Monitoring Map.

University of Toronto Mississauga Novo Nordisk Network for Healthy Populations

University of Toronto Mississauga Novo Nordisk Network for Healthy Populations is leading research to identify and implement strategies to reduce the inequities in risk and the burden of diabetes and other chronic diseases through better care, lower risk factors and healthier environments.

Trillium Health Partners Institute for Better Health Family and Child Health Initiative

The Trillium Health Partners Institute for Better Health Family and Child Health Initiative is leading research with the Black and South Asian communities to understand those with lived experience of diabetes and those that are caregivers.

Cities for Better Health

Cities for Better Health (CBH) (formerly Cities Changing Diabetes) is an international network of municipalities building and sharing strategies to prevent and manage diabetes.

To help prevent diabetes, the City of Mississauga joined Cities for Better Health (CBH) (formerly Cities Changing Diabetes) in 2021 to connect to an international network of municipalities building and sharing strategies to prevent and manage diabetes. The program was launched in 2014 by the Steno Diabetes Centre Copenhagen, University College London and Novo Nordisk.

The program has established local partnerships in approximately 40 cities around the world, with the City of Mississauga serving as the only active Canadian municipality. Through this membership, the City has accessed CBH resources, such as case studies from other cities, to inform our work.