Updates

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.

Transgender and nonbinary children and youth often face significant challenges compared to their cisgender peers. Many experience peer victimization, and trans teens also face verbal harassment in many Canadian schools. These adverse experiences also extend into the home, where trans and nonbinary youth may face emotional neglect or abuse by a parent or other adult.

These experiences cause significant harm, and they also place trans and nonbinary youth at risk for secondary mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety.

Knowing how many transgender and nonbinary youth are dealing with these disorders is critical to inform prevention and treatment efforts. A recent report by the Children’s Health Policy Centre, funded by the BC Ministry of Health, investigated the prevalence of mental health concerns for trans and nonbinary young people.

The report identified:

• The overall prevalence of mental disorders in transgender and nonbinary youth, which is 56.6% This makes it between 5.9 and 13 times higher than their cisgender counterparts.
• Significant rates of self harm or suicidal ideation among transgender and nonbinary youth, with prevalence up to five times higher than in their cisgender peers.
• A need for easily accessible and effective mental health treatments for these children and youth.
• The importance of addressing the unacceptable and preventable adverse experiences that many transgender and nonbinary young people face and that can contribute to the development of mental health conditions.

These findings can inform efforts to improve mental health service planning, delivery and equity for transgender and nonbinary children and youth in British Columbia.

To learn more, read the report and review the findings.

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.”