The Healthy Cities Research Initiative (HCRI), funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), has launched the HCRI: Data Analysis Using Existing Databases and Cohorts to support the use of existing survey, administrative and linked datasets, including the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). The funding opportunity supports research that leverages existing data to improve the health, wellness and health equity of urban populations. This is the six and last planned launch of this opportunity.

A total of $500,000 in funding is available to support approximately five one-year grants for projects addressing one or more of the following objectives:

• Evaluating the impact on health and health equity of interventions to the physical, social or policy environment (including health system–mediated interventions).
• Contributing analyses to directly inform the planning of physical, social or policy interventions with the purpose of improving urban population health or health equity.
• Addressing critical contextual questions related to the implementation of one or more interventions and scaling up (knowledge sharing) of evidence-based interventions (including health system-mediated interventions).
• Filling knowledge gaps that are critical for laying the foundation for future population health intervention research in urban areas. For example, increasing our understanding around how interventions may impact populations differentially according to gender, age, race, culture, ethnicity, income, or dis/ability.
• Developing and/or validating indicators and other data or evaluation tools that enable robust, comparable, replicable and equitable healthy cities intervention research and implementation science (including health system-mediated interventions).

Researchers interested in applying should visit ResearchNet for more information on eligibility, how to apply and the relevant research areas and data resources available.

If needed, researchers can download the CLSA Data Access Support Letter to include with their application.

Baseline and Follow-up 1 CLSA data have been linked to Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE) data on air quality, greenness, weather and climate, and neighborhood factors. This linkage allows researchers to ask questions about the impact of environmental factors on how Canadians age. To review the current list of available data, visit: www.clsa-elcv.ca/data-availability.

Researchers interested in requesting the Indigenous-identified data collected by the CLSA are required to describe how they intend to use Indigenous identifiers in their analyses and how they will involve Indigenous organizations, people and governing bodies in a meaningful and culturally safe way in their project. More information is available here.

The application deadline for the HCRI: Data Analysis Using Existing Databases and Cohorts funding opportunity is November 7, 2024. Funding is expected to begin March 1, 2025.

For more information on how to access CLSA Data, please review the CLSA Data Access Application Process.