Program: Convening and Collaborating Awards

Fifty years of infant and early childhood universal health care program evaluation has repeatedly demonstrated that effective early childhood services make a difference to secure more positive long-term health and wellbeing outcomes for children and their families. The early years are a critical period of transitions with fluctuating family needs. An array of services, each with its own structure and process exist. Children whose life circumstances are more complex will need additional support to help them to navigate what is already a challenging developmental journey. Such enhanced services should leverage connectivity by creating and enhancing opportunities for engagement and access despite contextual factors (i.e. rurality).

In addition, we are faced with a shift in the ways we have to work, financial and cost-saving plans, organisational restructuring and nuances linked to rural geography. What our team has come to learn is that in applying services from urban centres there is a lack in understanding the unique environmental factors, fiscal vulnerability, and cultural complexities in the north. Using our completed rapid realist review, as a starting point, we want to engage with a broader community to understand enhanced service needs for the north. Using a systems and compassionate leadership stakeholder approach, we wish to join enhanced service work streams across health, municipalities, social care and not-for-profit organisations.

In Canada, there has been a profound disconnect between emergency services and mental health services for youth and young adults. Recent evidence suggests that more than half of Canadian youth and young adults presenting to an Emergency Department (ED) with mental health and substance use (MHSU) needs have not had any previous mental health-related contact with the health care system.

In BC, the opioid epidemic has compounded this crisis, with youth and young adults accounting for 20-25% of all opioid-related overdoses and deaths. From coast to coast, there is an immediate need to improve referral to integrated youth and young adult services to limit repeated ED visits and hospitalization for MHSU disorders and to promote the health and well-being of this population. The goal of our work is to build a partnership in BC between a network of EDs and an integrated youth and young adult health services network called Foundry.

Specifically, we propose to coalesce a group of patients and their family, service providers, clinicians, and physicians for a one-day workshop to inform the development of an intervention (ED2Foundry) designed to improve the linkages between EDs and community health services for youth and young adults with MHSU concerns.  

Communication is central to everyday life. It is essential for maintaining relationships with family and friends and for participating in community, social, and leisure activities. In older adults, communication is particularly important because of the increased risk for social isolation and depression. A major contributor to communication disorders in BC is dementia, which has an estimated prevalence of 62,000. Most people with dementia (PWD) experience communication difficulties early on, making it a high priority for intervention.  

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are the health professionals with specialist knowledge in managing communication disorders. There is a strong evidence base for the provision of nonpharmacological interventions to address the communication needs of PWD and their families. However, SLPs report many barriers to implementing these interventions and PWD seldom have access to evidence-based communication care. There is a need to narrow this evidence-to-practice gap. We plan to create a collaboration between clinical research users and researchers to identify the barriers and facilitators to implementing evidence-based communication care in BC and to develop a set of research priorities for this area.   

Vaccine research projects have traditionally been designed by researchers with/without policymakers or doctors and without public involvement – the very people we are trying to protect from serious infections. In this project we will bring together groups of people with interest and expertise in vaccine research.

Our goal is to develop a plan for future vaccine research projects which is relevant to everyone – researchers, the public, public health and government officials who decide immunization programs and doctors. We will include trainees to ensure we are leaving the next generation in safe hands. We will first arrange a meeting of people from these different groups to discuss vaccine research priorities. We will then carry out a survey to include opinions from those who could not be included in the meeting.

Finally, we will bring the results of the survey to a final meeting where we would like to end up with at least 2-3 projects which address the identified BC vaccine research priorities – we will then try to obtain funding for these projects. This process will create a new group of people who we hope will work together for many years to come and make sure that vaccine research in BC remains relevant for everyone. 

This project will shine a light on a particular health inequity facing Aboriginal* communities in British Columbia, specifically those related to the delayed access to diagnostic and treatment services for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Though precise prevalence rates of ASD among Aboriginal children in Canada are unknown, data from other populations indicate this disorder is significantly under-diagnosed among Aboriginal populations (e.g. Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals). Recent personal communication with the provincial ministry overseeing ASD diagnosis and intervention funding (Ministry of Children and Family Development) suggests that in British Columbia, ASD is as prevalent among Aboriginal children as it is among those of non-Aboriginal ancestry, but that these children are receiving a diagnosis later and missing out on critical early intervention. We suspect this difference in access is related to unique challenges associated with geographical and cultural issues, the lack of specialized professionals in rural and remote regions of the province, cultural and spiritual beliefs about disability, and to histories of colonization and oppression.

This project aims to address this health disparity by beginning a dialogue with Aboriginal communities about their experience with ASD.

A two-day knowledge gathering event for Aboriginal families of children with ASD and their service providers will be hosted in partnership with an Aboriginal community. At the event, an overview of available provincial resources will be provided, including culturally appropriate information on ASD. Attendees will then be broken into small breakout discussion groups, and families and service providers will be invited to share their support experiences, perceived gaps and needs, and identify opportunities for how health research could facilitate improvement. Information and resources will be shared and exchanged with families, professionals, and community leaders.

These events will allow for the gathering of information on the challenges and barriers experienced by the Aboriginal communities of the Nlaka’pamux Nation, comprised of 16 First Nation communities in the Lytton and Merritt areas, as well as an off-reserve population in the Merritt area. Once the support needs of this community is understood, priority policy issues and future research questions will be identified.

* ‘Aboriginal’ is the term of preference for our research user co-lead.