Nearly Queerly: The Life and Death of a Queer Health Advisory Committee

Abstract

Abstract. This paper examines how a group of grassroots activists successfully lobbied for the creation of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons' population health advisory committee in Vancouver-Richmond, British Columbia. It documents how committee members balanced the at times conflicting interests of an institutional structure (the public health system) with those communities historically marginal to such institutions. The specific achievements and challenges of the committee and its members during its four-year life span, 1997-2001, are discussed, including their ramifications in other contexts. Since the early 1990s, health care in Canada has shifted from a geographically driven, services distribution towards a population health approach. Under population health, preventative and treatment strategies are tailored, based upon an understanding of the contexts in which persons become at-risk for disease. Instead of a system of services and care wholly structured around geographic catchment areas, indicators such as socio-economic status, gender, level of education, language and culture, and other social determinants are taken into account when design-