Updates

A paper by the BC Healthy Connections Project team has just been published in the prestigious journal BMC Public Health.

This “baseline” paper provides a profile of participants in a BC-based scientific evaluation of the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) program when they first entered the study, in early pregnancy. The paper reveals a group of girls and young women coping with substantial adversities. In addition to low income, most also face single parenthood, limited education, housing instability, severe anxiety or depression and experiences of maltreatment themselves when they were younger.

“Despite Canada’s public programs,” the paper concludes, “these pregnant girls and young women were not being adequately reached by social services. Our study adds new data to inform early intervention planning, suggesting that unacceptably high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage exist for some young British Columbians.”

The paper suggests that greater health and social supports and services are warranted for the young mothers and children involved, as well as for populations like them. The authors note that most of the adversities they have depicted are avoidable — with NFP being the starting point for prevention programming that can better support young families.

BMC Public Health is an open access, peer-reviewed journal, publishing articles on the epidemiology of disease and the understanding of all aspects of public health. The journal has a special focus on the social determinants of health, the environmental, behavioural, and occupational correlates of health and disease, and the impact of health policies, practices and interventions on the community.

A full copy of the paper may be seen here.

The BC Healthy Connections Project is continuing to follow these girls and young women and their children. Future reports will cover prenatal findings and the impact of NFP on child development and mental health when children reach age two years.

International Youth Day is being marked by the United Nations on August 12.

Our world currently has the largest youth population ever, some 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24. The problem? More than half of all children and adolescents lack basic reading and math skills, despite attending school.

As a result, the theme of Youth Day 2019 is “transforming education.” The UN will be evaluating the efforts of governments to transform education so it can help lead to sustainable development. The goal is to make education systems more inclusive, equitable and relevant.

According to the UN, “the crucial role that quality education plays in youth development is well recognized.” But the organization goes on to say that youth-led organizations also play a large and important role in lobbying, advocacy and other efforts to improve education.  For example, youth-led organizations are transforming education with lobbying and advocacy, partnerships with educational institutions, and by helping develop complementary training programs.

The Children’s Health Policy Centre has completed two companion systematic reviews — on childhood behaviour disorders and on childhood anxiety. Published in the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health these reviews outline effective interventions, including medications, across the entire prevention-to-treatment continuum. The bottom line from both reviews is that there is strong research evidence that we can prevent both behaviour and anxiety disorders in childhood, thereby averting much avoidable adversity early in life. There is also strong evidence that we can treat these disorders effectively, particularly making use of psychosocial interventions such as cognitive-behavioural therapy.

National Child and Youth Mental Health Day is being marked in Canada on May 7.

In honour of the day, the Children’s Health Policy Centre has timed the release of the 50th issue of its Quarterly publication about children’s mental health research. This celebratory edition is titled Celebrating children’s mental health: 50 lessons learned.

The purpose of the issue is to present effective interventions and all the “good news” we know about how to safeguard children’s mental health.

National Child and Youth Mental Health Day was started in 2007 by the Vancouver-based Institute of Families for Child & Youth Mental Health. It is intended to create awareness and acknowledgement of the thousands of children, youth, and families needing mental health support and care across Canada.