Public servants are central in helping Canadians navigate public health crises. Before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, these professionals have been essential to implementing widespread government interventions, sometimes amid significant public scrutiny. These experiences highlight the delicate balance public health officials maintain in a democracy: providing expert advice to cabinet to define the public good and implementing decisions to help preserve public health. Notwithstanding varying scopes for autonomous decision-making, chief medical officers of health aid elected officials in weighing tradeoffs in the pursuit of communal objectives, not by dictating them but by enabling informed decision-making. In recent years, there have been calls for public health officials to substitute their judgement for that of elected officials in issuing directives. This article explores the role of public health officials as public servants and the perils of these officials misunderstanding their roles which may undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of policy decisions.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 12. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 31 October 2026.
All research outputs
#4,249,140
of 34,754,530 outputs
Outputs from Healthcare Management Forum
#66
of 490 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#47,666
of 367,813 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Healthcare Management Forum
#1
of 4 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,754,530 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 87th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 490 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.5. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 367,813 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 87% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 4 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than all of them
