The Children’s Health Policy Centre (CHPC) has released the final issue of the Children’s Mental Health Research Quarterly — for now.

For 18 years, the Quarterly summarized the best available research evidence on a wide range of children’s mental health topics. The publication was funded by the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). The final issue — on anxiety treatments — was released on April 2.

“When we started the Quarterly we hoped it would continue and have long-term impact,” said Charlotte Waddell, Director of the Children’s Health Policy Centre and Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

“Its duration speaks to our partnership with the Ministry, and to our shared commitment as researchers and policymakers to improving children’s mental health. We’ve had a fantastic run, and we’re proud of the impact the Quarterly has had.”

The CHPC released the first Quarterly issue in 2007. The vision for the publication was to highlight high-quality research on children’s mental health and to make it available to policymakers, practitioners and community members.

“We wanted to share research on children’s mental health in an accessible format,” said Waddell. “The Quarterly allowed us to make the research freely available — to policymakers and practitioners, yes, but also to parents and anyone else with an interest in children’s mental health.”

Over the years, the Quarterly covered many common childhood disorders like anxiety and ADHD. But it also looked at topics relevant to the national mental health conversation. For example, a recent issue on prevention of opioid use disorders formed the basis for an article published in The Conversation. This article led to further media coverage, reaching a national audience on the importance of early opioid use prevention.

Though Waddell and the CHPC team are sad to see the publication end, they are looking forward to continuing their research and engagements with policymakers. And they are leaving the door open for a possible return.

“MCFD wasn’t able to renew the Quarterly contract, but we intend to seek other funding. In the meantime, we have other initiatives underway to help encourage the best possible prevention and treatment programs for children in BC and beyond,” said Waddell.

For readers who may miss the Quarterly, Waddell points to the extensive archive of past issues, which will remain online indefinitely. The complete subject index will also remain available indefinitely.

“We are grateful to our readers for being there for children’s mental health,” said Waddell. “We hope the Quarterly library will continue to be a useful resource for many years to come, and we invite anyone who is interested in our work to stay connected with us. The Quarterly is on pause, but our team will continue sharing research and working to improve the lives of children and youth.”

You can view all past issues of the Children’s Mental Health Research Quarterly in the online Quarterly archive.

A team of researchers from the Children’s Health Policy Centre (CHPC) have partnered with the Fraser Health Authority, Population and Public Health, to evaluate their new Enhanced Family Visiting (EFV) Program.

Led by Principal Investigator and CHPC Associate Director Nicole Catherine, the CHPC team aims to understand the experiences of those who took part in the EFV Program.

“The EFV Program was designed by Fraser Health to be more inclusive of diverse children and mothers,” said Catherine. “We now want to engage with mothers and nurses who participated in the program to learn about their experiences.”

EFV is an early prevention program designed to address avoidable childhood adversities. It is modelled on the Nurse-Family Partnership program (NFP), which involves intensive nurse-home visits starting in early pregnancy through to child age two years.

The CHPC team co-led the 10-year randomized controlled trial evaluation of NFP — the BC Healthy Connections Project — showing promising benefits for mothers and children by age two years. These benefits included reduced prenatal substance exposure; improved child mental health and language development, maternal mental health, and income; and reduced intimate partner violence exposure.

But while NFP is designed to reach young, English-speaking, first-time mothers experiencing disadvantage, the EFV Program serves a broader range of families. Those eligible for EFV also include Indigenous families, mothers with more than one child, older mothers, refugees and newcomers.

In collaboration with Fraser Health, the CHPC team will conduct research interviews with select EFV maternal clients to learn about their experiences with the program. The researchers will also survey EFV public health nurses to evaluate the delivery of the program. The survey questions will examine training, service implementation and additional resources needed.

The findings will help inform EFV program refinements to better reach and serve culturally diverse children and mothers who are experiencing disadvantage. Providing early prevention programs like EFV — for children experiencing disadvantage — is more cost-effective than later remediation. “It’s crucial that policymakers invest in effective early prevention programs to ensure that all young Canadians reach their potential,” said Catherine.

Funding effective prevention programs could significantly reduce youth drug use — that was the message shared by Adjunct Professor with the Children’s Health Policy Centre Christine Schwartz in an article published last week by CBC Health’s Second Opinion.

The article featured new research evidence showing that PreVenture, a school-based program developed by a researcher at the University of Montréal, produced a 35% reduction in the annual increase in the odds of teens developing substance use disorder, compared to a control group.

The piece also highlighted the need for sustained government funding to support and deliver programs such as PreVenture in schools across Canada.

Schwartz noted in her interview with CBC Health that policymakers are “increasingly turning to the research evidence” to evaluate drug prevention programs — and a growing body of evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of several prevention programs.

Second Opinion shared the link to a recent edition of The Children’s Mental Health Research Quarterly in which the CHPC presented findings from an evaluation of two such programs: Strengthening Families and Project PATHS. The CHPC team found that they were not only successful in reducing opioid misuse, but that they also reached large numbers of young people, highlighting the benefits of school delivery.

The missing piece, Schwartz told CBC Health, is funding to maintain these programs and put them in place more widely. But she is optimistic that the CHPC’s prevention-focused message will continue to reach policymakers and shape the national dialogue on youth substance use.

“It’s great to see this evidence on the effectiveness of school-based prevention programs being shared in national media,” she says. “These programs increase the likelihood that young people can lead happy, healthy lives and make it less likely they will suffer harms from substance use later on. This is a conversation we need to be having as a country, and one I’m sure policymakers will be paying close attention to.”

A team of researchers led by Children’s Health Policy Centre scholars Kimberly Thomson and Nicole Catherine has received a 2024 Convening and Collaborating (C2) Award from Michael Smith Health Research BC. The award funding will help the research team improve the evaluation of upstream public health interventions in British Columbia.

Public health interventions are more effective when they address the bigger picture of people’s lives — the social conditions in which they are born, live, and age. These “upstream” interventions aim to tackle the root causes of health problems, addressing systemic inequities that traditional healthcare approaches may overlook. But the impacts of these interventions can be difficult to measure.

Thomson and Catherine will address this challenge by facilitating a series of conversations between policymakers, researchers and health practitioners. Through online consultations and an in-person Thought Exchange event, they will bring together researchers and research users to discuss the evaluation of upstream public health projects in BC.

The goal of these conversations is to help participants:

• better understand current evaluation methods
• identify opportunities for coordination between public health researchers and institutions
• improve innovation and evaluation capacity
• set future research priorities

“We’re really excited to have these rich discussions with our public health partners,” said Thomson. “It’s a great opportunity to shape our collaborative research priorities, including for upcoming child health policy initiatives in BC that we’ll be measuring and monitoring.”

The C2 Award supports researchers in British Columbia who are working collaboratively to address public health challenges. More information about the project and the award can be found on the Michael Smith Health Research BC website.

Social supports may be universally beneficial for adolescents, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Adolescence.

Written by researchers including Kim Thomson, an assistant professor of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and a CHPC team member, the paper tracked the emotional health of immigrant, refugee and non-immigrant early adolescents in British Columbia.

The study found that immigrant and refugee adolescents across 10 school districts started Grade 4 with poorer emotional health than their peers, highlighting the need for culturally responsive supports for these students. From Grades 4 to 7, both immigrant and non-immigrant adolescents experienced a decline in their emotional health.

However, first-generation refugees were a notable exception — they reported feeling more satisfied with life over the same time.

Despite the differences in emotional health between the groups, Thomson and her co-authors “did not find differences in the associations between improvements in emotional health and improvements in social support by immigration group.” This indicates that social supports may benefit all adolescents regardless of their immigration backgrounds.

“These results highlight social support as a modifiable factor within schools that can promote young people’s emotional health,” the study concluded.

To learn more, read the full paper.

In the historic halls of the BC provincial legislature, Kimberly Thomson discovered how much government runs on relationships.

The Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and member of the Children’s Health Policy Centre was attending a two-day session at the legislature as part of a Science Meets Parliament event in April.

With the goal of improving conversation between policymakers and scientists, the Science Meets Parliament organizers had arranged for Thomson and the other delegates, including several members of SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, to meet with MLAs and government staff.

As part of the experience, all delegates met with Raj Chouhan, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, and with Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin. Thomson also met with BC Green Party representatives, including Party Leader Sonia Furstenau, and with NDP MLA Dan Coulter, the Minister of State for Infrastructure and Transit. Despite working in different fields, Thomson and the MLAs she met with discovered several points of connection, including shared interests in child rights, diversity and inclusion, and youth justice. These conversations helped Thomson better understand how policymakers set their agendas.

“It was really beneficial to spend the day immersed in their world and understand what their priorities are, the considerations that they are juggling when making different policies,” Thomson said.

“Research is important for policy making, but it’s only one part. Your researcher brain says that if you just construct the best possible evidence and present it to them, they’ll make the decision based on that. But that’s not entirely how it works. At the end of the day, policymakers want to make the best decisions for people living in BC and there are a number of factors to consider.”

For Thomson, this experience also highlighted the importance of the work the Children’s Health Policy Centre does to share its research with policymakers.

“Building connections with policymakers allows you to be part of their process so they might call on you for advice,” she said. “This experience made me respect and appreciate the time and effort that goes into building these relationships and how special it is that the Centre has these relationships.”

Thomson spent the rest of the program attending Question Period, listening to panel discussions with legislators, and networking with the 30 other Science Meets Parliament delegates from universities across BC. She left the legislature with several new connections and a stronger sense of how she could support policy decisions through her work.

“I would absolutely recommend it [Science Meets Parliament] to other researchers,” Thomson said. “This was an invaluable experience to better understand the roles and responsibilities of policy makers, their priorities, and how science can best support decision-making.”

Science Meets Parliament is hosted by the Canadian Science Policy Centre, a non-profit organization dedicated to building a strong and inclusive science policy community in Canada. Since 2018, the annual event has brought emerging science leaders to Parliament Hill in an effort to strengthen the connection between Canada’s scientific and political communities. The Science Meets Parliament BC program was the event’s first expansion into a provincial legislature.

Centre Director Charlotte Waddell gave a virtual talk about a Nuu-chah-nulth-led study on healthy child development to the child health advisory board at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research on April 10.

The talk was titled, “Everything is One, Everything is Connected.”

Waddell presented together with SFU scholar Pablo Nepomnaschy, on behalf of Lynnette Lucas and the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council team, the study leads.

The presentation described a multi-generational study being conducted by and within the 14 Nuu-chah-nulth Nations, whose ancestral lands are located on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

“As non-Indigenous research allies,” Waddell said, “team members from SFU are helping to merge the best of Indigenous and ‘Western’ science while upholding high ethical standards including ensuring Indigenous data sovereignty.”

“This study will be ‘the Framingham’ of Indigenous Peoples,” Waddell added, quoting Indigenous scholar Jeff Reading, who is co-leading the Nuu-chah-nulth project. Framingham refers to a famous long-term cardiovascular health study that began in 1948 and is now on its third generation of participants, helping to improve population wellbeing.

Funding and community consultations for the Nuu-chah-nulth project began in 2017 and continued in 2022 with a grant of $15 million over six years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, in partnership with Alberta First Nations.

“Everything we do,” Waddell said, “involves constant reciprocity and respect for Indigenous Knowledge and wishes.

“We are working to overcome some of the harmful legacies of colonialism by supporting Indigenous leadership of research that is by and about them, as one step towards truth and reconciliation.”

Centre Director Charlotte Waddell gave a Zoom talk to close to 300 parents, practitioners and policy makers on Dec. 2. The talk was titled, “Neurodiversity and mental health: Serving children better.”

The presentation covered the following themes:

• The need to create communities where all children are welcomed and celebrated, and where services are delivered according to needs so that all children can flourish and meet their potential.
• The prevalence of anxiety, ADHD, behaviour disorders and depression, which are higher for children experiencing three particular forms of neurodiversity (autism spectrum disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome disorder and intellectual disability).
• The research evidence for effective treatments for these four conditions for children with the three forms of neurodiversity.
• The effective treatments for other common childhood mental disorders that can also be offered, with adaptations when needed

“We need to ensure that timely and effective treatments are offered to all children, particularly if they are neurodiverse, given higher prevalence rates,” Waddell told the group.

The talk ended with celebrating people who are neurodiverse, and the communities that support them over the lifespan.

Waddell then stayed on the Zoom call to respond to questions and comments. She also joined a small breakout group discussion to learn more about parent’s perspectives.

A recording of the talk can be seen here.