A prevention program for Grade 7 students could help end the opioid crisis, according to a recent article by the team from the Children’s Health Policy Centre.

Published in The Conversation, the article is based on research findings about school-based primary prevention interventions over the last 20 years.

“Many of Canada’s responses to the opioid crisis still focus downstream on adults, after problems have started or become entrenched,” the article said. “In contrast, primary prevention operates upstream in childhood — before most young people start engaging in substance use, misuse or experimentation.”

The two most promising school-based programs are: Strengthening Families and Project PATHS, and they have been tested in the US and Hong Kong. Both led to significant reductions in opioid use by young people, including over long-term follow-up.

The two programs have another feature adding to their appeal for delivery in Canada, according to the authors. Training for facilitators is very brief — only two days for Strengthening Families and three days for Project PATHS.

“The short training time also helps reduce delivery costs, further increasing the appeal for policy-makers and school administrators,” the article said.

In concluding, the authors noted that the federal government has committed more than a billion dollars since 2017 to address the toxic drug problem — paralleled by provincial and territorial funding. “But a policy shift towards meaningful prevention also requires tackling the realities of current Canadian health spending priorities,” they said.

“Only 6.1% of health spending in 2023 went towards public health including prevention, a longstanding pattern. So concerted, coordinated and collaborative efforts are needed within and across every policy level and jurisdiction.”

So new prevention efforts are badly needed to tackle the opioid crisis in Canada — thereby ensuring that many more children do not go on to experience avoidable harms.

Read the full article here.

A new study on the Covid-19 pandemic by SFU Assistant Professor and CHPC team member Kim Thomson, has just been published in Plos One.

The study found that parents with children at home reported nearly double pre-pandemic population estimates of moderate to severe psychological distress.

Psychological distress was more frequently reported among parents with pre-existing mental health conditions, disabilities and financial stressors. As well, parents with greater psychological distress reported an increase in negative interactions with their children as a result of the pandemic, and perceived higher anxiety in their children.

“These results highlight that meaningful responses to promote mental health among parents and families must address social and structural inequalities,” the report concluded.

In the same timeframe, Thomson was also co-author of another paper on the Covid-19 pandemic, this one published in the Journal of Adolescence. It profiled the social connectedness among early adolescents in Grade 7 before the pandemic was declared (Winter 2020) and in Grade 8 during the second wave of the pandemic (Winter 2021).

The paper concluded that connectedness with peers and adults in Grade 7 was significantly related to higher levels of mental wellbeing in Grade 8 even during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting the protective role of social connection.

Charlotte Waddell, Centre Director, gave a Sept. 14 talk with the Doctors of BC, Community of Practice on Child and Youth Mental Health. The talk was titled, “Children’s mental health: Research for informing practice and policy.”

Waddell covered crucial messages including the high prevalence of childhood mental disorders and the severe service shortages — with fewer than half of children with these disorders getting any kind of help.

For this talk, which took place in Vancouver with an audience of approximately 100 family physicians, child and youth psychiatrists and policymakers, among others, she urged strong advocacy — to not only address the service gaps, but also ensure that BC invests in effective prevention programs to reduce needs in the population. Waddell noted: “Your advocacy can and will be very powerful in making a difference for children.”

A passion for child and youth mental health has brought Kimberly Thomson to Simon Fraser University and the Children’s Health Policy Centre.

Recently named an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Thomson started her academic career by earning an undergrad degree in psychology from Queens University. Thinking initially what she’d become a counsellor, she did her Master’s degree in educational and counselling psychology at the University of BC.

“But I ended up pivoting away from a purely clinical perspective when I started working with a team looking at children’s health from a population level,” Thomson recalls. She then joined the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP)  team at UBC, becoming a research coordinator supporting the pilot of a population-based survey of child wellbeing.

Shortly after that, she began her PhD in population and public health. Her dissertation focused on finding early indicators of children’s social and emotional development at the time they entered school. Her objective? To see how these indicators related to the children’s future mental health and well-being, using both public health administrative data and also children’s self-reports.

“One of the main takeaways was that more than 40% of children entering the school system were showing up with relative social-emotional vulnerabilities,” she said, citing higher than average scores for issues such as anxiety or hyperactivity.

Following graduation, Thomson did a post-doc in Melbourne, Australia, where she worked at Deakin University with a group studying the social factors and conditions that predict child and youth mental health. There, she was helping to investigate one of the earliest origins of childhood mental health challenges – among the parent’s generation. “We suspect there are multiple pathways between generations,” she says. “It can be genetic, but it can also be psychological and social.”

But, caught in the crosshairs of the Covid pandemic, Thomson returned to Canada earlier than expected, in 2020. She transferred back to HELP and began looking at mental health outcomes among subgroups that might have experienced inequities, including children who came to Canada as immigrants or refugees. She also studied the impacts of the pandemic on child and youth mental health, including working with the Canadian Mental Health Association, the BC Ministry of Education and the BC Teachers’ Federation.

Most recently, she worked at the BC Centre for Disease Control as an evaluation specialist with the population and public health team. “This was a great opportunity to apply my skills in evaluating programs and initiatives that are trying to address underlying social factors — such as food insecurity — that influence population health,” she said.

But when an opportunity arose with the Children’s Health Policy Centre, Thomson leapt at the chance. “I’ve always been interested in the intersection between research and policy and practice,” she says. “What drew me to the CHPC was the alignment of our goals. I’m especially interested in opportunities to intervene earlier when interventions are more likely to be effective.”

Right now, she’s developing her research and teaching portfolios and making plans for grant applications. She’s also going to be joining Charlotte Waddell and Nicole Catherine on SFU’s developmental trajectories research challenge team, for the Faculty of Health Sciences.

“I think we share the same goals,” she says. “Our focus is on improving well-being for all children and doing it through policy.”

Canada needs to substantially increase public investments in effective interventions to improve the mental health of children.

That was one of the key messages from a June 19/23 talk by Christine Schwartz, psychologist, SFU adjunct professor and Children’s Health Policy Centre scientific writer.

She was speaking to policy-makers, practitioners and researchers at a talk sponsored by the Children’s Healthcare Canada network.

The 30-minute Zoom presentation, followed by a Q&A session, was part of the SPARK program, designed to showcase knowledge, evidence and expertise to spark conversations, ideas and action.

“Effective collaborations between researchers and policy-makers can play a tremendous role in advancing the wellbeing of children,” Schwartz told the group. Audience members were especially interested in learning how CHPC team members have been able to conduct research that is both academically rigorous and responsive to the needs of policy-makers.

Go here to see a recording of the presentation.

Children’s Health Policy Centre Associate Director Nicole Catherine has just been named an affiliate faulty member of The Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) at the University of British Columbia.

Catherine also holds the Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Child Health Equity and Policy and is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

“I am thrilled to join HELP as an affiliate faculty member,” she said in the announcement of the honour. 

In an April 27 talk to faculty, staff and trainees at HELP, Catherine said that early prevention of childhood adversities through research-policy-practitioner collaborations is one of her major motivators.

As the former scientific director of a public health randomized controlled trial known as the BC Healthy Connections Project, she told the group: “Our plans to examine the longer-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an early intervention, across adolescence, will directly inform policymakers, those who need to act to help children flourish.”

Audience members said the retention protocol — developed prior to data collection — impressed them because it ensured sustained engagement with 739 unserved families across 2.5 years. Catherine said: “Families that are unfairly labelled difficult to reach, and therefore underserved by health care, still need to be reached.”

Catherine is now leading new work exploring how to adapt enhanced maternal-child health programs, such as Nurse-Family Partnership, for Indigenous children and mothers in BC.